 | "...Herodotus is my name, I am from Halikarnassos and am now telling the world about the research I did to keep the memory of the past alive and to immortalize the great, impressive works of the Greeks and other people."
"...As a token of their unanimity they decided to leave a memorial and that led to the building of the labyrinth, which is situated not far from the southern bank of the Moiris lake, in the neighborhood of a place called Crocodilopolis. I have been there and it is beyond all description. If you would make a survey of all city walls and public buildings in Greece, you will see that all together they did not ask so much effort nor money as this labyrinth. And the temples in Efesse and Samos aren't exactly nothing either! It is true, the pyramids make you speechless and each and everyone of them equals many of our Greek buildings, but they cannot stand comparison with the labyrinth."
"...To start, it has a dozen indoor gardens of which six on a row at the northern side and six at the southern side. They are built in such a manner that their portals are face to face. An exterior wall without openings surrounds the entire complex. The building itself is a two-storied one and has three-thousand chambers of which half of these are underground and the other fifteen-hundred are on the ground floor."
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I had to stop reading. Three-thousand rooms with indoor gardens and one single ring wall encircling the building. More gigantic than this is not possible! Half of the rooms are above and the other half under ground. Imagine rooms with a length of only two meters, then the total length would be three kilometers! That gave me dizzy-spells. This had to be the largest building ever! No doubt about it. Why wasn't it known better? Could it be vanished from the earth? It was still there in 448 BC. Has it been taken apart since then and used for other buildings?
"... I visited and looked at the fifteen-hundred ground-floor chambers myself, so I speak from personal experience, but for the underground chambers I have to rely on the authority of others, because the Egyptians refused to let me in. There, the tombs can be found of the kings that originally built the labyrinth, and of the holy crocodiles. So I have not been there and everything I know about it, I know from hearsay.
The rooms on top of them have indeed been shown to me. You would not believe they were built by human hands. The passages interconnecting the chambers and the winding paths from court to court were breathtaking in their colorful variety, as I walked in full admiration from the courtyard to the chambers, from the chambers to the colonnades, from the colonnades to again other chambers and from there into still more courtyards. The ceiling of all these places where made of stone, just as the walls which are covered with relief-figures. Each courtyard is surrounded with a row of white marble, seamless columns."
Good God, I groaned. What luxury! And nowhere is mentioned that it had been plundered or demolished! But then where was this monumental labyrinth, with the tombs of the twelve kings? Undoubtedly, there must be the biggest treasures ever to be found in Egypt! Tutankhamen's treasury is nothing compared to this.
With burning head, I read on:
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 "...Right by the corner where the labyrinth stops, stands a pyramid of at least seventy-five meters high and decorated with a relief of large animal figures.
It can be reached through an underground passage.
But, however spectacular this labyrinth is, the lake Moiris, right next to it, makes one really gasp.
Its perimeter is 3600 stadiums or sixty schoinoi - 666 kilometers - as long as the entire Egyptian coastline. This long-drawn-out lake has a north-south orientation and its depth is more than ninety meters at its deepest. It is probably man-made because in the middle are two pyramids, each reaching ninety meters above the water, while their base is equally far under water.
The lake is not getting water from natural sources, that would be impossible because the surrounding country is bone-dry; no, a canal is its connection to the Nile. Through the canal the water flows into the lake during half a year and the other six months it flows back into the river again. The profit for the royal treasury during this period is at least one silver talent per day because of the fish that are caught there."
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