Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 October 1891 — “WHAT I SAW IN EGYPT,” [ARTICLE]

“WHAT I SAW IN EGYPT,”

Is the Subject of Dr. Talmage’s Sermon. Sunday, God Planned the Pyramids—Cheops Was a Scoundrel—Monuments Amount ——? to Nothing. — I? T—~ Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at Brooklyn, Sunday. Subject, '‘From the Pyramids to the Acropolis, or What I Saw in Egypt and Greece Confirmatory of the Scriptures.” Text, Isaiah xix, 19-20. He said; Isaiah no doubt refers to the great pyramid at Gizah, the chief pyramid of Egypt. The text speaks of a pillar in Egypt, and this is the great£stj>|Uar ever lifted; und the text says it is io be at the border of the land, and this pyramid is at the bor- • der of the land: and the text says it shall be for a witness, and the object of this sermon is to tell what this pyramid witnesses. We had on a morning of December, 1889, landed in Africa. Amid the howling boatmen at Alexandria we train for Cairo, Egypt, along the banks of the most thoroughly harnessed river of all the world—the river Nile. We had, at entered the city of Cairo, the city where Christ dwelt while staying in Egypt during the Herodic persecution. It was our first night in Egypt. No destroying angel sweeping through as once, but all the stars .were out and the skies were filled with angels of beauty and angels of light, and the air was balmy as an American June. The next morning we were early awake and at the windows, looking upon palm trees in full glory of leafage and upon gardens of fruits and flowers at the very season when our homes far away are canopied by bleak skies and the last leaf bf the forest has gone down in the . equinoctials. ' ' But how can I describe the thrill of expectation, for to-day we are to see what all the world has seen or wants to see—the Pyramids. We are mounted for an hour and a half’s ride. We pass on amid bazars fctuffed with rugs and carpets, and curious fabrics of all sorts from Smyrna, from Algiers, from Persia, from Turkey, and through streets where we meet people of all colors and all garbs. Carts loaded with garden productions, priests in gowns, women in jblack veils, Bedoins in long and seemingly superfluous apparel, Janissaries in jacket of embroidered gold, out and on toward the great pyramid; for though there arc sixty-nine pyramids still standing the pyramid of Gizeh is the monarch of pyramids. We meet camels.grunting untler their

and seg buffaloes on either side, browsing in pasture fields. The road we travel is for part of the way under clumps of acacia and by long rows of sycamore and tamerisk, but after awhile it is a path of rock and sand and we find we have reached themargin of the flesert, the great and we cry out tb the dragoman as we see a huge pile of rock looming in sight, “Dragoman, what is that?” His answer is “The Pyramid,” and then it seemed as if we were living a centuryjeyery minute. Our thoughts and (‘motions were too rapid and intense for utteri> 'ance and we ride on in silence until we come to foot of the pyramid spoken of in the text," the oldest structure in all the earth, 4,000 years old at least. Here it is. We stand >mder the shade of a structure that shuts out all the eartlranth aU-the sky; aruT we look up and strain outvision to appreciate the distant top, and-areoverwhelmcd while we cry “.The Pyramifft-The-pyramid!” ■ * I had started that morning with a determination of ascending the pyramid. One of my chief objects in going toEgypt_was..not_only_Xosee tlie ba.se of that granite wonder but~ to stand on top of it. Yet the nearer I came to, this eternity in stone the more my determination was shaken. Its altitude to me was simply appall- > ing. A great height has always been to me a disagreeable sensation. As we dismounted at the base of the pyramid I said: “Others may go up it but not I. I will satisfy myself with a view from the base. The ascent of it would be to me a foolhardy undertaking. ' But after Ijhad given up all idea of’ascending, I found*tny daughter was determined to go, and I could not let her go with strangers, and I changed my mind and we started with guides. It can not be 'done without these helpers. Two or 'three times foolhardy men have attempted it alone,-but their bodies came tumbling down unrecognizable and lifeless. Each person in our fiarty had two or three guides or idpers. One of them unrolled his turban and tied it around my waist and he held'the other end of the turban as a matter of safety. Many of the blocks of stone are four or five feet high and beyond any ordinary human stride unless assisted. But i two Arabs to pull and two Arabs to push, I found myself ranidly ascending from height to height, and on to altitudes terrific, and, at last, on the 1 tip top, we found ourselves on a level space of about thirty feet square. Through clearest atmosphere we looked off upon the desert, and off upon the winding Nile, and off upon the Sphinx, with its features of everlasting stone, and yonder up,on the minarets of Cairo, glittering jin the sun, and yonder upon Memphis in ruins, and off upon the wreck of empires and the battle-fields of ages, a radius of view enough to fill ■ the mind and shock the nerves and .overwhelm one’s entire being. 1 After looking around for awhile.

and a kodak had pictured the group, we descended. The descent was more trying than the ascent, for climbing you need not see the depths beneath, but coming down it was impossible not to see the absyms below. But two Arabs ahead to help us down, and two Arabs to hold us back, we were lowered, hand below hand, until the ground was invitingly near, and amid the jargons of the Arabs we were safely landed. Then came one of the most "wonderful feats of daring and agility. One of the Arabs solicited a dollar, saying he would r»n up and down the pyramids in seven minutes. We would rather have given him a dollar not to go, but this ascent and descent in seven minutes he was determined on, and so by the watch in •seven minutes he went to the top and was back again at the base. It was ft blood-curdling spectacle. I said the dominant color of the pyramid was gray, but in certain lights it seems to shake off the gray of centuries and become a blonde, and the silver turns to the golden. It covers thirteen acres of ground. What an antiquity ! It was at least 2,000 years old when the baby Christ was carried within sight ol it by hia fugitive parents, Joseph and Mary. The storms of forty centuries have drenched it, bombarded it, shadowed it, flashed upon it, but there it stands ready to take another forty centuries of atmospheric attack if the world should continue to exist. The oldest buildings of the earth are juniors to this great senior of the centuries. Herodotus says that for ten years preparations were being made for the building of this pyramid. It has 82,111,000 cubic feet of masonry. One hundred thousand workmen at one time toiled in its erection. To bring the stones from the quarries a caseway sixty feet wide was built. The top stones were lifted by machinery such as the world knows nothing of to-day. It is 746 feet each side of the square base. The structure is 450 feet nigh, higher than the Cathedrals of Cologne, Strasburg, Rouen, St. Peter and St. Paul. No surprise to me that it was put at the head of the Seven Wonders of the world. It has a subterraneous room of red granite called the “King’s chamber,” and another room called the 1 ‘ Queen’s chamber, ” and the probability is that there are other rooms yet unexplored. The evident design of the architect was to make these rooms as inaccessible as possible. After the work of exploration and all the digging and blasting, if you would enter these subterraneous rooms you must go through a passage onlythree feet eleven inches high and less than four feet wide. A sarcophagus of red granits stands down under this mountain of masonry. The sarcophagus could not have been carried in after the pyramids were built. It must have been put

there before the structure was reared Probably in that sarcophagus once lay a wooden coffin containg a dead King, but time has destroyed the coffin and destroyed the last vestige of human remains. For three thousand years this sepulchral room was unopened and would have been until to-day, probably unopened, had not a superstitious impression got abroad that the heart of the pyramid was filled with silver and gold and diamonds, and under Al Mamoun, an excavating party went to work and having bored and blasted through a hundred feet of rock they found no opening ahead, and were about to give up the attempt when the workmen heard a stone roll down into a seemingly hollow place and encouraged by that they resumed their work and came into the underground rooms? The disappointment of the workmen im finding the sarcophagus empty of all silver and gold and precious stones was so great that they would have as sassin a ted AlMamoun, who employed them, had he not hid in another part of the pyramid as much silver and gold as would pay them for their work at ordinary rate of wages, and induced them there to dig till they to their surprise, came upon adequatecompensation. I wonder not that this mountain of lime-stone and red granite has been the fascination of scholars, of scientists, intelligent Christians in all ages. Sir John Herschel, the astronomer. said he thought it had astronomical significance. The wise men who accompanied Napolean’s army into Egypt went into profound study of the pyramid. In 1865 Prof. Smyth and his wife lived in the empty tombs near by the pyramid that they might be as continuously as possible close to the pyramid which they were investigating. The pyramid. built more than 4,000 years ago being a complete geometrical figure, wise men have concluded it must have been divinely constructed. Men came through thousands of years to fine architecture, to music, to painting; but this was perfect at the world s start, and God must have directed it, All astronomers and geometricians and scientists say that it was scientifically and mathematically constructed before science and mathematies were born. From the inscriptions on the pyramid, from its proportions, from the points of the compass recognized in its structure, from the directions in Which its tunnels run, from the relative position of the blocks that compose it, scientists, Christians and infidels .have, demonstrated that the being who planned this pyramids must have known the world’s sphericity.and that its motion was rotary, and how many miles it was in diameter and circumference, and how many tons the world weighs, and knew at what point in the heavens certain star§ would appear at certain periods of time. Not in the 4,000 years since the putting up of that pyramid has a

single fact in astronomy or mathemathics been found to contradict the wisdom of that structure. Yet they had not at the age when the pyramid was started an astronomer, an architect or a mathematician worth mentioning Who, then, planned the pyramid? Who’ superintended its erection? Who from its first foundationstone to its cap stone erected everything? It must have been God. Isaiah was right when he said in my text, “A pillar shall bejat the border of the land of Egypt and it shall be for a sign and a witnsss. ” The pyramid is God’s first Bible. Hundreds if not thousands of years before the first line of the book of Genesis was written the lesson of the pyramid was written. Well, of what is this cyclopean masonry a sign and a witness? Among other things, of the prolongation of human work compared with the brevity of human life. In all the 4,000 years this pyramid has only lost eighteen feet in width; one side of its square at the base changed only from 764 to 746 feet, and the most of that eighteen feet taken off by architects to furnish stone for building in the city of Cairo. The menwhoconstructed the pyramid worked at it only a few years and then put down the trowel and the compass and the square and lowered the derrick which had lifted the ponderous weights, but forty centuries has their work stood and it will be good for forty centuries more. All Egypt has been shaken by terrible earthquakes and cities have been prostrated or swallowed up, but that pyramid has defied all volcanic paroxysms. It has looked upon some of the greatest battles ever fought since the world stood. Where are the men who constructed it? Their bodies gone to dust and even the dust scattered. Even the sarcophagus in which the king’s mummy may have slept is empty. My hearers, remember that those who built the pyramids were common workmen. Not one of them could lift those great stones. It took a dozen of them to lift one stone, and others just wielded a trowel, clicking it on the hard edge or smoothing the mortar between the layers. One hundred thousand men toiled on those sublime elevations. Cheops didn’t build the Pyramid. Some boss mason in the world’s twilight didn’t build the Pyramid. One hundred thousand men built it and perhaps from first to last 200,000 men. So with the pyramids now rising, pyramids of evil oman, pyramids of good. The pyramid of drunkenness rising ever since the time when Noah got drunk on wine, although there was at his time such a superabundance of water. All the saloonists of the ages adding their layers of ale casks and wine pitchers and rum-jugs until the Pyramid overshadows the Great Sahara Desert of desolated homes, and broken hearts, and destroyed eternities. And as the pyramid still rises, layers of human skulls and

other mountains of human bones to whiten the peaks reaching into the heavens, hundreds of thousands of Sle are building that pyramid. So the pyramid of righteousness. Multitudes of hands are toiling on the steps—hands infantile, hands octogenear jan, m asculine hands, female hands, strong hands, weak hands. Some clanging a trowel, some pulling j a rope, some measuring the sides. Layers of psalm-books on top.jof layers of sermons. Layers of prayers on top of layers of holy sacrifice. I And hundreds of thousands coming down to sleep their last sleep, but other hundreds of thousands going up to take their places, and the pyramids wiU continue, to rise. un.tiL.the. millennial morning gilds the completed works, and the toilers on these heights shall take off their aprons and throw down their trowels, crying, “It is finished.” Further, carrying out the idea of my text, the Pyramid is a sign and a witness that big tombstones are not the best way of keeping one’s self affectionately remembered. This pyramidand .the sixty-nine other pyramids still standing were built for sepulchers, all this great pile of granite and limestone by which we stand today, to cover the memory of a dead King. It was the great Westminister Abbey of the ancients. Some say that Cheops was the King who built this Pyramid, but it is uncertain. Who was Cheops, anyhow? All that the world knows about him could be told in a few sentences. The only thing certain is that he was bad and that he shut up the temples of worship and that he was hated so that the Egyptians were glad when he was dead. This pyramid of rock 740 feet each side of the square base and 450 feet high wins for him no respect, If a bone of his arm or foot had been found in the sarcophagus beneath the pyramid it would have excited no more veneration than the skeleton of a camel bleaching on the Libyran desert; yea, less veneration for when I saw the carcass of a camel by the roadside on the way to Memphis, I said to myself: “Poor thing. I wonder of what it died.” We say nothing against the marble or the bronze of the necropolis. Let all that sculpture and florescence and arborescence can do for the places of the dead be done, if means will allow it. But if after one is dead there is nothing left to remind the world of him but some pieces of stone there is but little use. _ Some of the finest monuments are over people who amounted to nothing while they lived, while some of the worthiest men and women have not had above them a stone big enough to tell their name. Joshua, the greatest warrior the world ever saw, no monument; Moses, the greatest lawyer that ever lived,no monument; Paul, the greatest preacher that ever lived, no monument; Christ, the.

Savior of the world and the rapturf of heaven, no monument. A pyramid over scoundrelly Cheops, but only a shingle with a lead pencil epitaph oyer many a good man’s grave. Some of the finest obituaries have been printed about the worst rascals. To-day at Brussels there is a pyramid of flowers on the grave of Boulanger, the notorious libertine. Yet it is natural to want to be remembered. While there seems to be no practical use for post-mortem consideration later than the time of one’s great-grandchildren,yet no one wants to be forgotten as soon as the obse?uies are over. This pyramid, which saiah says is a sign and a witness, demonstrates that neither limestone nor red granite are competent to keep one affectionately remembered; neither can bronze; neither can Parmarble; neither can Aberdeen granite do the work. But there is something out of which to build an everlasting monument and that will keep one freshlj remembered 4,000 years; yea, forever and ever. It does not stand in marble yards. ' It is not to be purchased at mourning stores. Yet it is to be found in every neighborhood, plenty of it, inexhaustible quantities of it. It is the greatest stuff in the nniverse to build monuments out of. I refer to the memories of those to whom we can do a kindness, the memories of those whose struggles we may alleviate, the memories of those whose souls we may have. AH around Cairo and Memphis there are the remains of pyramids that have gone down underthp wearing away of time, and this great pyramid of which Isaiah in the text speaks will vanish if the world lasts long enough; and if the world does not last, then with the earth’s dissolution the Pyramid will also dissolve. But the memories of those with whom we associate are indestructible. They will be more vivid the other side of the grave than this side. It is possible for me to do you a good and for you to do me a good that will be vivid in memory as many years after the world is burned up as all the sands of the sea-shore and all the leaves of the forest and all the grass blades of the field and all the stars of heaven added together, and that aggregate multiplied by all the.figures that all the book-keepers of all time ever wrote, That desire to be remembered after we are gone is a divinly implanted desire, and not to be crushed out, but I implore you, seek something bette? than the .immortalization of rock, or bronze or book. Put yourself into the eternity of those whom you help for both worlds, this and the next. Comfort a hundred souls and there will be through all the cycles of eternity at least a hundred souls that will be your monuments.