Identifier: photographicview01thom (find matches)
Title: Photographic views of Egypt, past and present
Year: 1856 (1850s)
Authors: Thompson, Joseph Parrish, 1819-1879. (from old catalog)
Subjects:
Publisher: Boston, J. P. Jewett and company Cleveland, Ohio, Jewett, Proctor, and Worthington
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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oEgypt. The tree has certainly renewed its youth, and itswide spread branches afford a grateful shelter, both to thecontemplative and to the hungry visitor. It was fortunate that a visit to the pyramids wasreserved for the JinaU to our tour of Egypt. We hadgazed for hours upon these wondrous masses, in sailing upand down the river, and we had studied their proportions,and their relative position from the citadel of Cairo, but itwas not till the day of discharging our boat upon our returnfrom Upper Egypt, that we found an opportunity to visitthem. The road to the pyramids from Ghizeh, opposite oldCairo, is extremely beautiful, lying through groves of palms,and over cultivated plains, with the grand monuments offour thousand years bounding the horizon. As we rode inthe freshness of the morning, the booming of cannon fromthe citadel announced a military inspection at Ghizeh bythe Pasha, and reminded us that the land of the Pharaohsis in the keeping of a deputy of the Sultan of Turkey. It
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THE PYRAMIDS AND SPHINX. 341 seemed as though we had come to the burial-place ofEgypt, and these heavy solemn reverberations between theMokuttam and the pyramids, were funeral honors to themighty dead. A ride of two hours brought us in sight of the sphinx,and being in advance of the party, I had leisure to inspectit alone. Of all the monuments of Egypt, this is the mostmysterious, and the most impressive. On the verge of thedesert, whose sands are heaped around it, in advance of thethree pyramids that stand as an immovable phalanx toguard it from destruction, this colossal figure, — the humanhead upon the body of an animal, emblematic of the unionof intellect and physical force, ■— measuring more thansixty feet from the ground to the crown of the head, morethan a hundred feet around the forehead, and nearly ahundred and fifty feet in length, all cut from the solid rock,looks out in unfathomable silence over the empty plain,where once stood Memphis in the pride of the earlierPhar

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