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[Page 19]
where the different varieties are all displayed, spear the ones you fancy with a fork and then after paying for them at the desk you go and find a seat in the room or the garden outside when you are served with tea.
Saturday 12/2/16. This afternoon Tad, Miers, Stewart, Shanks and myself all went to the Pyramids – The journey in was exciting enough for we had no sooner boarded the tram at the railway than we saw a corporal of the English troops killed by a tram. As this caused a block we decided to walk to Ezbekish Gardens and saw a soldier attacking a native, also two natives having a scrap, so that our journey was quite full of incident. At last we alighted at our destination and made our way up the winding path to the foot of the Great Pyramid, passing soldiers having races up and down on donkeys, laughing and yelling whist their long legs seemed almost to reach the ground, and behind them, waving their sticks and calling out stop, races the donkey boy fearful lest the soldiers would go off with the animal. Behind them, more sedately, ambles the ungainly camel with a Turk or a Red Cross Nurse on its back looking anything but comfortable, especially when he stops and kneels down, when the rider finds himself on a slope at an angle of 45° to the earth. The foot of the pyramids of Cheops (the Great Pyramid) reached we gaze up at the hugh pile of stone standing 450 feet high, and covering an area of 13 acres, with its faces scarred by the weather of 4,700 years, but still retaining their shape, whilst their wonderful construction soon makes itself apparent, each huge block of stone being in a sort of way dovetailed into each other. They are indeed fitting monuments to cover that great King who had such resources at his command, using 300,000 men three months every year during its construction, for carting the stone only, whilst the skilled workmen had permanent barracks there The reason why the men were used for three months only each year is that that three months was the period during which the Nile was in flood and they could not work. Miers and I climbed to the top, the others staying behind, and our energy was amply rewarded by the glorious view. The land within our vision was divided into two vast areas of different colour divided by one long straight line reaching to the horizon, formed by the edge of the irrigation area,