Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/83

tomb which rises, dominating its fellows, from this range of low sandhills has for so many thousand years aroused the awe of mankind that the faculty of human speech and the resources of human imagination have had a considerable time to exercise and exhaust themselves upon it. That justice has still to be done to it in spite of all these efforts, and that probably such justice never will be done to it, is not surprising. For, after all, how should it have been; how should it ever be possible for description to deal adequately with an object possessing two characteristics which overshadow all the rest, and of which one eludes the eye and the other paralyses the imagination? Size too huge to be visually measured; age too vast to be mentally realised; that is the Pyramid of Cheops. It is discernible so far off that, as has been said already, the first glimpse of it disappoints the beholder with an appearance of insignificance, while when you are close to it the absence of any standard of

e