DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.5073#0126
THE PYRAMIDS.
U5
quietly passive in the hands of the three Arabs ap-
portioned to each visitor. When once you have com-
menced the real business, they are good-natured and
careful fellows, proud of their knowledge of half a dozen
sentences in half a dozen Languages, and anxious to
please you; they know best how to tie up your garments
so that they shall not impede your progress, and how to
lift you with least exertion or disagreeableness to your-
self, and the sole piece of advice I give to my country-
women is, to let them lift you, and — to leave your
crinoline in Cairo. Many of the stones are four feet
in height, but the Arabs lift you at one jump with
more ease than a stool or any other contrivance will
afford you; sometimes, too, they appear to mistake
you for a doll or a swaddled baby, and you find your-
self seized by the ankles as well as by the arms'. Even
thus passively impelled upwards, the ascent is an
enormous fatigue to both blood and breath.
The now broken summit affords a platform of thirty-
two feet square, with stones upon which and beside which
you can rest comfortably; the view is fine, and interest-
ing as being characteristic of Egypt, and should, I think,
be viewed at the commencement of the traveller's stay
in the country, thus taking in, at one glance, what you
learn by slow degrees afterwards. Cairo, with its un-
countable minarets, the most varied in form and the
most picturesque in the world, rising upon the steep
slope of the Mokuttum hills, up to the citadel and
the mosque of Muhammed 'Ali, is a remarkable view in
itself; still more so the clearly-marked boundaries of
the wide sandy Desert, so melancholy and bare-looking,
from the verdant, smiling plain studded with palm trees
.which adjoins it: while the pyramids of Abouseer, Sak-
kai-a and Dashoor, to the south, give a sort of still life
I 2
U5
quietly passive in the hands of the three Arabs ap-
portioned to each visitor. When once you have com-
menced the real business, they are good-natured and
careful fellows, proud of their knowledge of half a dozen
sentences in half a dozen Languages, and anxious to
please you; they know best how to tie up your garments
so that they shall not impede your progress, and how to
lift you with least exertion or disagreeableness to your-
self, and the sole piece of advice I give to my country-
women is, to let them lift you, and — to leave your
crinoline in Cairo. Many of the stones are four feet
in height, but the Arabs lift you at one jump with
more ease than a stool or any other contrivance will
afford you; sometimes, too, they appear to mistake
you for a doll or a swaddled baby, and you find your-
self seized by the ankles as well as by the arms'. Even
thus passively impelled upwards, the ascent is an
enormous fatigue to both blood and breath.
The now broken summit affords a platform of thirty-
two feet square, with stones upon which and beside which
you can rest comfortably; the view is fine, and interest-
ing as being characteristic of Egypt, and should, I think,
be viewed at the commencement of the traveller's stay
in the country, thus taking in, at one glance, what you
learn by slow degrees afterwards. Cairo, with its un-
countable minarets, the most varied in form and the
most picturesque in the world, rising upon the steep
slope of the Mokuttum hills, up to the citadel and
the mosque of Muhammed 'Ali, is a remarkable view in
itself; still more so the clearly-marked boundaries of
the wide sandy Desert, so melancholy and bare-looking,
from the verdant, smiling plain studded with palm trees
.which adjoins it: while the pyramids of Abouseer, Sak-
kai-a and Dashoor, to the south, give a sort of still life
I 2