Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/86

68 imaginations. It may well be, as they tell us, that the Great Pyramid would fill Lincoln's Inn Fields, and that its apex would tower above the cross of St. Paul's. But this, alas, is not Lincoln's Inn Fields, nor are we now surveying the summit of our great metropolitan cathedral from the top of Ludgate Hill; and to fancy ourselves on the steps of the College of Surgeons, or facing the statue of Queen Anne, is surely an imaginative effort no less difficult than that which it is supposed to facilitate.

As to the age of the Pyramid, it is no more possible to conceive of that than it is to realise its size. We may flatter ourselves that we do so when we are mechanically repeating as the result of the latest and most authoritative computations of Egyptologists that Cheops flourished about 3733, or some 5627 years ago. But it is in fact a mere idle form of words. We simply lose our mental way in these enormous tracts of time, as we should lose our geographical way in