Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: for the night, having brought no tents. But the description was drawn from imagination, and we could find no shelter but a sort of open doorway or portico eight feet high, ten feet long, and five broad. This proved to be the entrance to the closed tomb of Nefermat, a building older than the great pyramid of Gizah, perhaps the earliest monument in Egypt with name and date at all assignable. It was from a tomb near this that the pair of statues representing Rahotep and his wife were taken—the oldest stone statues in the world, perhaps the most wonderful objects amid the wonders of the Bulak museum. We spread a carpet in the portico and lay down, while 'AH made coffee: then we walked to the pyramid, which differs from other pyramids in rising by terraces and in being unfinished. Moreover it has never been opened : the secret of its five thousand jears remains inviolate. But the bees had frayed the surface of the huge fabric with their tiny cells, and chameleons darted about the crevices of the stones. The pyramid, as I have mentioned, and the tomb, stood at the edge of the desert, on an elevated plateau overlooking eastward the green plains watered by the Nile: while westward stretched the untra- velled sands of the Sahara. At the foot of this A NIGHT ADVENTURE. 47 plateau was a dyke or canal, for ages out of use, but still half filled with water. Wild fowl abounded, and towards sunset when they were on the wing I sallied out, hoping to get a duck for our dinner. But there was not an atom of covert, and no chance of getting a shot from ambush, while the ducks were much too wary to come within range. But we fared well enough, and after dinner sat in our tomb smoking and talking, moralising on the historic site we were profaning, and rekindling classic memories of philosophers...