They swam in a rich haze that took from them all suggestions of unfeeling stone, and made them seem only the airy nothings of a dream -- structures which might blossom into tiers of vague arches, or ornate colonnades, may be, and change and change again, into all graceful forms of architecture, while we looked, and then melt deliciously away and blend with the tremulous atmosphere.
At the end of the levee we left the mules and went in a sailboat across an arm of the Nile or an overflow, and landed where the sands of the Great Sahara left their embankment, as straight as a wall, along the verge of the alluvial plain of the river.

A laborious walk in the flaming sun brought us to the foot of the great Pyramid of Cheops.

It was a fairy vision no longer.

It was a corrugated, unsightly mountain of stone.

Each of its monstrous sides was a wide stairway which rose upward, step above step, narrowing as it went, till it tapered to a point far aloft in the air.