In the Shadow of the Pyramid

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22628, 16 January 1937, Page 6 (Supplement)

In the Shadow of the Pyramid

By OLIVE BARRON

The Glamour of Moonlight

IT was miil-day when I saw the Great Pyramid for the first time, and my first impression was one of disappointment. The air was so still and hard in the strong sunshine that it seemed to itonsifv one's consciousness of the oppression and the slave labour that had gone into the masonry, the solid weight of which is six million, eight hundred and forty-eight tons. Ihe basement stones are, many of them, thirty feet in length and five feet high. Napoleon stood beneath the Great Pyramid with his soldiers and said: "Soldiers, forty centuries look down upon you from the top of the pyramids."" Ex-King Edward when Prince of Wales, climbed step by step to the small platform on the top, teed a golf bajl on a bottle and had one crowded moment of glorious life as he drove his ball. Then with a smile, he gave « guinea to the fellahin guide who found it. The perpendicular height is four hundred and eighty-five feet, and the length of a side seven hundred and

sixty-four feet, but one must stand right under the pyramid to realise its size. To catch something of its real significance, both material and spiritual, however, ono must see it in the early morning or at sunset, or best of all, by moonlight when the desert sand has given up the heat of the day's sunshine and the air become fresh and vital. Then, in the vastness of the African night with its infinite space, the Great Pyramid gives out something ineffable that possesses the soul. Small things matter little in the universal scheme —Life is a passing shadow. "The dead are many and the living few." Jt shares with the Sphinx the secrets of the desert, and with it seems to read the future as the past.