Our journey around the world; an illustrated record of a year's travel of forty thousand . ut for the pyramids one is well prepared. Not that theydo not grow on the imagination. Almost every stupendouswork of architecture does thus improve upon mind must have some time to adjust itself to its propor-tions, and the longer one gazes upon the pyramids, and thenearer he approaches their towering bulk, the more im-pressed is he with these wonders of the ancient and modernworld, the more he marvels how they could possibly bebuilt in rude ages when labor-saving machinery was
Our journey around the world; an illustrated record of a year's travel of forty thousand . ut for the pyramids one is well prepared. Not that theydo not grow on the imagination. Almost every stupendouswork of architecture does thus improve upon mind must have some time to adjust itself to its propor-tions, and the longer one gazes upon the pyramids, and thenearer he approaches their towering bulk, the more im-pressed is he with these wonders of the ancient and modernworld, the more he marvels how they could possibly bebuilt in rude ages when labor-saving machinery was com par- TIME-DEFYING MONUMENTS. 419 atively unknown, the more he begins to suspect that, afterall, these ages which could have built the pyramids were notso rude as his modern conceit is prone to suppose. It is doubtful if they could be built to-day with all theappliances that modern invention has rendered familiar,with the aid of steam and electricity, and every contrivancewhich the ingenuity of four thousand years has been able tosupply. It is doubtful if those vast blocks of stone could be. THE GREAT PYRAMIDS. quarried or transported, or raised to their present position,or laid so accurately, by any master mason of to-day. When we think that the building of the pyramids wasonly an index to the civilization of the centuries that sawthem erected, our inflated notions concerning the importanceof the nineteenth century in the roll of the ages growssomewhat smaller. The pyramids are like isolated peaks insome vast sea, which still remain above the surface to tell ofthe mighty continents which have been submerged. Every-thing perishable has been swept away, cities and farms,canals and roadways, the accumulations of centuries of 420 WHY WERE THE PYRAMIDS BUILT ? wealth, the arts and sciences of the ages long gone by, areall buried under the sand of the desert. The pyramidsalone remain to tell us what the world then was, and todwarf the pigmy products and enterprises of the present
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade189, booksubjectvoyagesaroundtheworld
