Travel Diary of Mrs. R.P. Eaton:
Europe, Egypt, and Palestine, ca. 1857

object of attraction here is the tomb of spies or the Sacred
Bull, one of the gods worshiped at Memphis. As each
successive lull died, he was embedded and buried in
a splendid granite sarcophagus,
--Another fair morning and a fine ride over the
fields brought me face to face with the marvelous Sphinx
and at the feet of hoary, old Chiops. A marked play in
a tourist’s life! As I approached the Great Pyramid,
I was somewhat disappointed in its size until I came
quite near it, when it seemed at once to expand to a
magnitude quite overwhelming. One looks up to the
vast pile, silent and spell-bound. A sense of awe comes
over him, with a new idea of the power of man and the
perpetuity of his works. I could now easily conceive how
this stupendous monument might cover full twelve
acres of ground. A simple side of its square base is
more than seven-hundred and fifty feet long. Nearly
five hundred feet in perpendicular height, its faux
slopes are very steep and seem to blend in a point at
the top. A party halfway up appear like bids or spir-
inrels on a church steeple. Each side is a vast stairway
of stone layers from a foot and a half to four feet in thick-
ness, each layer being indented a foot on little more, allow-
ing that much for the width of the successive steps.
---The little space at the top, that may be
thirty feet square, in covered with visitors named. The view
is wide and grand, embracing the Lybian desert and the
Pyramids on its border, the Nile and its valley the min-
arels and citadel at Cairo and the Mookattaan hills.
---I found it a more difficult task to creep along the small,
dark, steep, and suffocating passages leading to the chambers of
the king and queen in the interior of the Pyramid. These
passage-ways and the separate chambers, that of the king
being much the Cargon, are lined with smooth-lain granite
while the whole exterior of the Pyramid is of lime stone, the
blocks being handsomely cut and painted. The King’s chamber
contains an empty sarcophagus, where the monarch hopical for
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