Poole, Reginald S.: The cities of Egypt (London, 1882)

16

CITIES OF EGYPT.

for three, four, or five thousand years was first or second
in Egypt; the famous shrine, enriched by successive
kings, from the first who ruled the land to the Mace-
donian sovereigns who courted the powerful priesthood ;
all that stood within the ample circuit of the walls, is
levelled to the ground, and the traveller is shown a
fallen Colossus 1 and a few fragments near by, and told
that he stands in the precincts of the Temple of Ptah,
the Egyptian Vulcan, and that of Memphis herself
nothing else remains.

Yet no city in the world has so many or such costly
monuments. As you stand on the platform of the
Citadel of Cairo that commands the westward view, you
look across the vast modern city, the plantations of
mulberry trees and the rolling Nile, and the other side
of the valley rich in corn-lands, with the long line of
palms in which Memphis is just traced, and you see in
the farthest distance the low edge of the Libyan desert,
spreading like an even rampart, along whose summit rise
in four groups the shining masses of the Pyramids of
Memphis, like the boundary-marks of the mighty waste,

1 The Colossus is said to have been recently set up by an
English traveller.