"Publish in Noph... say ye, Stand fast, and prepare thee; for the sword shall devour round about thee... Noph shall be waste and desolate without an inhabitant." -Jer. xlvi. 14, 19.

"Thus saith the Lord God, I will also destroy the idols, and I will cause their images to cease out of Noph."Ezek. xxx. 13.

"In approaching this interesting spot, the traveller passes through a magnificent grove or forest of palm trees, extending for miles along the bank of the river, and almost concealing from view the villages now recognised as the site of the ancient Memphis, the Noph of Scripture, the royal city of Egypt. Truly, that which was written has come to pass: Noph shall be waste and desolate without an inhabitant.' Apis and Osiris, the temples, the idols, and the images are gone, and have left no trace. Thus saith the Lord God, I will destroy the idols, and will cause the images to cease out of Noph.' The only image that remains as a memorial of the past, is the beautiful colossal statue of Sesostris, in red granite, now prostrate, and lately excavated to the head and shoulders... The features are exquisitely chiselled, and the expression gentle and benignant. The height of the statue, more than half of which is yet buried, cannot be less than forty feet. A few granite fragments, deeply cut with hieroglyphics, are the only relics of this capital of the Pharaohs; and Noph must' indeed' have had distresses daily,' before her name, and place, and remembrance could have been so blotted out from among the nations. She cried unto the gods she had chosen, but they could not deliver her in the time of tribulation, and she is now cast up as heaps,' and nothing of her left."-NOZRANI in Egypt.

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"We had a charming ride over the site of ancient Memphis, where now stands the village of Metrahineh, embosomed in a magnificent forest of palm-trees. During the period of the inundation, as the waters rise

and approach the houses of Metrahineh, the population abandon their habitations, and establish temporary abodes in the palm-trees, where they construct a scaffolding which serves them to sit and sleep upon. Above their heads hang the clusters of dates which compose their food; and beneath their feet roll the waters of the Nile, where they slake their thirst, and thus they sustain themselves and live like birds or monkeys, until the waters subsiding, once more enable them to descend and rebuild their mud hovels, which are always destroyed by the inundation.

"The once magnificent Memphis, the Noph of the Scriptures, the abode of royalty, the capital of Lower Egypt under the Pharaohs, has been swept irrecoverably from the face of the earth, and left no trace of temple or palace behind; nothing, save the mutilated half of a colossal statue of Rhamses Sesostris, remains to tell of the ancient splendour of this city, whose desolation was foretold in the inspired words of prophecy. This huge fragment now lies on its face in a large pool of water... We stumbled (also) upon a small statue of rose-coloured granite, (of extremely beautiful workmanship,) which appears either to have formed part of an altar, or to have been an accessary to a statue of much larger dimensions, as a considerable body of granite, of which it forms a part, is buried in the ground. This, and the capital of a column, are the sole vestiges, besides the prostrate Sesostris, that we could trace of the royal city of Memphis. But we could judge of what it had been by its vast necropolis, which covers an immense tract of the desert. This dreary space is scattered from one end to the other with skulls and bones bleached white as snow, and other evidences of the reckless commerce which for years has been carried on with the spoils of the dead by the natives.

"Memphis is a city of the very highest antiquity, its origin being attributed to Menes. 'He raised,' says Herodotus, 'a dyke at Memphis;' for anciently the

river flowed near the sandy hills which skirt Libya; but he, filling up the river at the turn it makes about a hundred furlongs southward of Memphis, laid the old channel dry, and led the stream midway between the mountains. This Menes, the first of the kings, having drained the ground which he had secluded, founded on the spot the city called Memphis. Memphis is situated in the narrowest part of Egypt. Without the city, he dug a reservoir from the river towards the north and west, for towards the east it was bounded by the Nile itself. The same monarch reared at Memphis a vast and renowned temple of Vulcan. Memphis continued to be the capital of Lower Egypt throughout many dynasties, though sometimes, as we learn from the monuments, and from the prophet Isaiah, it divided this honour with Zoan or Tanis. (Which of the two cities was the capital when Joseph entered the country, and when the Exodus took place, cannot with certainty be determined). It suffered much from the invasion of the Persians at the time that the bull Apis was slain by Cambyses; but it again revived, and held its pre-eminence till Alexandria began to flourish in so remarkable a manner under the Ptolemies. Its site, which is said to have formed a circuit of about fifteen miles, has now nothing to mark it out but a few mounds, and a colossal statue of Rameses the great a small figure of red granite, greatly mutilatedand a few foundations."-See WILSON'S Lands of the Bible.

"OUR first expedition was to the top of the great pyramid of Cheops... the material is limestone, much worn and shaken by time and violence; the steps, or rather the successive layers of massive blocks which constitute the pyramid, are not less than two feet high... There seems no doubt whatever that the pyramids were once cased in polished marble, and that the rough broken layers of limestone which their sides now expose to view, were only intended as rude beds for a more valuable and highly wrought material. Herodotus, writing of this great pyramid more than two thousand years ago, tells us, that Cheops ordered stone to be brought from the quarries of Arabia;' certainly not common stone. He speaks of these stones as being 'highly polished and admirably jointed, none of them less than thirty feet long.' Nothing can be clearer than his description of the mode of building. This pyramid,' he says, 'was first con

structed after the fashion of steps, and when completed so far, the remaining stones were raised up by machines made of short wooden logs, by which the blocks were raised from the ground on to the first step; and so on from the first to the second, and the second to the third, till they reached the top, there being as many machines as steps; and thus they completed the top first, and gradually worked their way downwards to the base, which was finished last.' All this is clear enough, and shows that the external casing of marble was as it were dove-tailed into the rough limestone notches or steps, which are now stripped of their beautiful smooth covering, though patches of cement and splinters of marble still adhere in the cracks and crevices; and Cephrene's pyramid, the second in size, is still coated with an even bed of mortar for nearly one-third of its height from the top, which renders it difficult and dangerous of ascent. Pliny informs us that the peasants of a neighbouring village were famed for their skill in climbing these pyramids, (and) it must have been a daring and dangerous enterprise to scale the steep, smooth, shining, slippery sides of these stupendous masses. Diodorus, in the Augustan age, speaks of the great pyramid as still uninjured, and built (as he supposed, though really only cased), with Arabian marble...

"To restore the pristine glory and grandeur of the pyramids, we must suppose them disinterred from the sandy grave in which they now stand nearly up to their middle, and give them resplendent robes of shining white Arabian marble, smooth and polished from the base to the apex. Wonderful they assuredly are-strange, surpassing strange. They must have been once beautiful, of perfect proportion and resplendent material: sublime they still are; rearing their giant forms, and flinging their dark shadows in desolate places, for three of the six thousand years that have rolled away since the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life!"