names were handed down to posterity as those of evil-minded and impious kings, who neglected the service of the gods to gratify their own vanity, and, so long as they could exalt themselves, did not care how much they oppressed their people.  There was not even the poor apology for their conduct that their oppression fell on slaves, or foreigners, or prisoners of war.  Egypt was not yet a conquering power; prisoners of war were few, slaves not very common.  The labourers whom the pyramid builders employed were their own free subjects whom they impressed into the heavy service.

It is by a just Nemesis that the kings have in a great measure failed to secure the ends at which they aimed, and in hope of which they steeled their hearts against their subjects’ cries.  They have indeed handed down their names to a remote age:  but it is as tyrants and oppressors.  They are world-famous, or rather world-infamous.  But that preservation of their corporeal frame which they especially sought, is exactly what they have missed attaining.

    Let not a monument give you or me hopes,
    Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops,

says the doggerel of the satiric Byron; and it is the absolute fact that while thousands of mummies buried in common graves remain untouched even to the present day, the very grandeur of the pyramid builders’ tombs attracted attention to them, caused the monuments to be opened, the sarcophagi to be rifled, and the remains inclosed in them to be dispersed to the four winds of heaven.

Still, whatever gloomy associations attach to the pyramids in respect of the sufferings caused by their erection, as monuments they must always challenge a certain amount of admiration.  A great authority declares:  “No one can possibly examine the interior of the Great Pyramid without being struck with astonishment at the wonderful mechanical skill displayed in its construction.  The immense blocks of granite brought from Syene, a distance of five hundred miles, polished like glass, and so fitted that the joints can scarcely be detected!  Nothing can be more wonderful than the extraordinary amount of knowledge displayed in the construction of the discharging chambers over the roof of the principal apartment, in the alignment of the sloping galleries, in the provision of the ventilating shafts, and in all the wonderful contrivances of the structure.  All these, too, are carried out with such precision that, notwithstanding the immense superincumbent weight, no settlement in any part can be detected to an appreciable fraction of an inch.  Nothing more perfect mechanically has ever been erected since that time."[8]

[Illustration:  VIEW OF THE GREAT AND SECOND PYRAMIDS.]