religious homage. By the process of embalming, they endeavored to
preserve the body from the common laws of nature; and they provided
those magnificent and durable habitations for the dead--sublime
monuments of human folly--which have not preserved but buried the memory
of their founders. By a singular fatality, the well-adapted punishment
of pride, the extraordinary precautions by which it seemed in a manner
to triumph over death, have only led to a more humiliating
disappointment. The splendor of the tomb has but attracted the violence
of rapine; the sarcophagus has been violated; and while other bodies
have quietly returned to their native dust in the bosom of their mother
earth, the Egyptian, converted into a mummy, has been preserved only to
the insults of curiosity, or avarice, or barbarism.




THE PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT.


The pyramids of Egypt, especially the two largest of the group of Jizeh
or Gize, are the most stupendous masses of buildings in stone that human
labor has ever been known to accomplish, and have been the wonder of
ancient and modern times.--The number of the Egyptian pyramids, large
and small, is very considerable; they are situated on the west bank of
the Nile, and extend in an irregular line, and in groups at some
distance from each other, from the neighborhood of Jizeh, in 30° N.
Latitude, as far as sixty or seventy miles south of that place. The
pyramids of Jizeh are nearly opposite Cairo. They stand on a plateau or
terrace of limestone, which is a projection of the Lybian
mountain-chain. The surface of the terrace is barren and irregular, and