Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/17

Rh on their backs, and the donkey boys, now belaboring the little beasts, and now helping their own slow steps by dragging at their tails—all these make a variety and change of which one never wearies.

Of course, however short one's visit to Cairo, and however often he has been there before, he must ride out to the Pyramids, to look again with awe and wonder at those mighty monuments of the past; and to Heliopolis, to see the oldest obelisk in Egypt, still standing, as it stood four thousand years ago in front of the Temple of the Sun, where Joseph saw it when he married the daughter of the priest of On; and where Plato studied philosophy, as Moses had studied before him, and became, like him, "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians." To its attractions in the way of antiquities, Cairo has recently had a great addition in the royal mummies lately discovered at Thebes, which have been brought down the Nile, and placed in the Museum at Boulak, which I visited with Dr. Grant, who is an authority as an Egyptologist. If it is an honor to stand before kings, even dead kings, I had it to the full that day. There I saw the open sarcophagus which holds the mummied body of Rameses II., whose daughter took Moses out of the bulrushes. Dr. Grant has in his private collection a ring, of which he has good reason to believe that it once adorned the finger of Menephtah, the son and successor of Rameses, and the very Pharaoh of the Exodus.

Not less interesting to me, in a different way, was a visit to Dr. Schweinfurth, the distinguished African traveller, who makes his home in Cairo, as the most convenient point from which to make his journeys into the interior of Africa. Here he has gathered his great collections of plants; his walls are lined with charts and maps, on which he kindly traced for me the outlines of his