Well, now my eyes saw and knew, and
my hands and my feet informed my understanding that there was
nothing at all abstract about the great Pyramid--it was a big
triangle, sufficiently concrete, easy to see, and rough to the
touch; it could not, of course, affect me with the peculiar
sensation which I have been talking of, but yet there was something
akin to that old nightmare agony in the terrible completeness with
which a mere mass of masonry could fill and load my mind.
And Time too; the remoteness of its origin, no less than the
enormity of its proportions, screens an Egyptian Pyramid from the
easy and familiar contact of our modern minds; at its base the
common earth ends, and all above is a world--one not created of
God, not seeming to be made by men's hands, but rather the sheer
giant-work of some old dismal age weighing down this younger
planet.
Fine sayings! but the truth seems to be after all, that the
Pyramids are quite of this world; that they were piled up into the
air for the realisation of some kingly crotchets about immortality,
some priestly longing for burial fees; and that as for the
building, they were built like coral rocks by swarms of insects--by
swarms of poor Egyptians, who were not only the abject tools and
slaves of power, but who also ate onions for the reward of their
immortal labours! {37} The Pyramids are quite of this world.
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