History of Ancient Egypt. George Rawlinson
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the Second Pyramid (the Pyramid of Shafra), and supposed to be contemporary with it, astonishes the observer by its gigantic proportions. It is known to the Arabs as Abul-hôl, the father of terror. It measures more than one hundred feet in length, and was partially carved from the rocks of the Lybian hills. Between its out-stretched feet there stands a chapel, uncovered in 1816, three walls of which are formed by tablets bearing inscriptions indicative of its use and origin.
A small temple behind the great Sphinx, probably also built by Shafra, is formed of great blocks of the hardest red granite, brought from the neighbourhood of Syene and fitted to each other with a nicety astonishing to modern architects, who are unable to imagine what tools could have proved equal to the difficult achievement. Mysterious passages pierce the great Sphinx and connect it with the Second Pyramid, three hundred feet west of it. In the face of this mystery all questions are vain, and yet every visitor adds new queries to those that others have asked before him.
Since what unnumbered year
Hast thou kept watch and ward,
And o'er the buried land of fear
So grimly held thy guard?
No faithless slumber snatching,
Still couched in silence brave,
Like some fierce hound, long watching
Above her master's grave....
Dost thou in anguish thus
Still brood o'er Œdipus?
And weave enigmas to mislead anew,
And stultify the blind
Dull heads of human-kind,
And inly make thy moan,
That, mid the hated crew,
Whom thou so long couldst vex,
Bewilder and perplex,
Thou yet couldst find a subtler than thine own?
Even now; methinks that those
Dark, heavy lips which close
In such a stern repose,
Seem burdened with some thought unsaid,
And hoard within their portals dread
Some fearful secret there,
Which to the listening earth
She may not whisper forth.
Not even to the air!
Of awful wonders hid
In yonder dread Pyramid,
The home of magic fears;
Of chambers vast and lonely,
Watched by the Genii only,
Who tend their masters' long-forgotten biers,
And treasures that have shone
On cavern walls alone,
For thousand, thousand years.
Would she but tell. She knows
Of the old Pharaohs;
Could count the Ptolemies' long line;
Each mighty myth's original hath seen,
Apis, Anubis,—ghosts that haunt between
The bestial and divine,—
(Such he that sleeps in Philæ,—he that stands
In gloom unworshipped, 'neath his rock-hewn lane,—
And they who, sitting on Memnonian sands,
Cast their long shadows o'er the desert plain:)
Hath marked Nitocris pass,
And Oxymandyas
Deep-versed in many a dark Egyptian wile,—
The Hebrew boy hath eyed
Cold to the master's bride;
And that Medusan stare hath frozen the smile
Of all her love and guile,
For whom the Cæsar sighed,
And the world-loser died,—
The darling of the Nile.
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