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 birds or squirrels on a church steeple. Each side is a vast stairway of stone layers from a foot and a half to four feet in thickness, each layer being indented a foot on little more, allowing 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 minarets 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