Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night - Volume 5.djvu/132

 cubits, of the normal measure of the day, and it had four faces, each three hundred cubits long from the base and thence battering upwards to a point. The ancients say that, in the western Pyramid, are thirty chambers of parti-coloured syenite, full of precious gems and treasures galore and rare images and utensils and costly weapons which are anointed with egromantic unguents, so that they may not rust until the day of Resurrection. [FN#156]  Therein, also, are vessels of glass which bend and break not, containing various kinds of compound drugs and sympathetic waters. In the second Pyramid are the records of the priests, written on tablets of syenite, to each priest his tablet, whereon are engraved the wonders of his craft and his feats; and on the walls are the human figures like idols, working with their hands at all manner of mechanism and seated on stepped thrones. Moreover, to each Pyramid there is a guardian treasurer who keepeth watch over it and wardeth it, to all eternity, against the ravages of time and the shifts of events; and indeed the marvels of these Pyramids astound all who have sight and insight. Many are the poems that describe them, thou shalt thereby profit no small matter, and among the rest, quoth one of them,

If Kings would see their high emprize preserved, * Twill be by tongues of monuments they laid: Seest not the Pyramids? These two endure * Despite what change Time and Change have made.

And quoth another, Look on the Pyramids, and hear the twain * Recount their annals of the long-gone Past: Could they but speak, high marvels had they told * Of what Time did to man from first to last.