CHAPTER VI.

AN ENTRY MADE;

First partially in Classic, then in Saracen, times.

THERE is little enough of hollow interior to enter into, in any of the Egyptian Pyramids, as they are generally all but solid masses of masonry. And yet what very little there is, will be found quite characteristic enough to raise up a most radical distinction of kind, as well as degree, between the Great Pyramid and every other monument, large or small, Pyramidal or otherwise, in all the continent of Africa, and Asia as well.

What the earlier of the Ancients knew about the Interior of the Great Pyramid.

The progress of profane historical knowledge of outside men, with regard to what constituted the hollow interior of the Great Pyramid, from the earliest times after the very building operation itself had ceased (say 2,150 years B.C.), down to later Greek and Roman eras,—was both slow and peculiar. Had we now before us, in one meridianal section of the monument, all that such very ancient knowledge had arrived at, the tale would amount to little more than this—that when the Great Pyramid stood on the Jeezeh hill in the primeval age of the world in white masonry, unassailed; a simple, apparently solid, crystalline shape, with the secret of its inner nature untouched; clothed too, complete on 100every side, with its bevelled sheet of polished casing-stones, the whole structure rising from a duly levelled area of also white rock-surface in four grand triangular flanks up to a single pointed summit,—that then it contained within, or beneath its foot (trending down from the north, and entering at a point about 49 feet above the ground, near the middle of that northern side) merely an inclined descending passage of very small bore, leading to a sort of subterranean, excavated chamber in the rock, about 100 feet vertically under the centre of the base of the whole built monument.

This one subterranean chamber did really exist, in so far as it had been begun to be carved out, deep in the heart of the rock, with admirable skill. For the workmen, having cut their sloping way down to the necessary depth by the passage, commenced with the chamber's ceiling, making it exquisitely smooth, and on so large a scale as 46 feet long by 28 broad. Then sinking down the walls from its edges in vertical planes, there was every promise of their having presently, at that notable 100-foot depth inside, or rather underneath the surface of the otherwise solid limestone mountain, a rectangular hollow space, or chamber, whose walls, ceiling, and floor should all be perfect, pattern planes. But when the said men, the original workers it must be presumed, had cut downwards from the ceiling to a depth of about 4 feet at the west end, and 13 feet at the east end, they stopped in the very midst of their occupation. A small, very small, bored passage was pushed on into the rock merely a few feet further towards the south, and then that was also left unfinished; a similar abortive attempt was likewise made downwards, but with the only result, that the whole floor, from one end of the chamber to the other, was left a lamentable scene of holes, rocks, and up-and-down, fragmentary confusion. Verily (seeing that the whole light of day was reduced down there to. 101a mere star-like point at the upper end of the long entrance-passage, nearly 340 feet long), verily, it was an answering locality for “the stones of darkness and the shadow of death.” (See Plate VI. and Plate IX.)

This one item, moreover, of a subterranean, unfinished chamber, with a sloping passage of approach, there is good reason for believing, was all that the native and profane Pharaonic Egyptians themselves knew of, from within a generation after the Great Pyramid had been built, to the latest times of their nation; excepting only certain comparatively modern men of a fanatic invading army, who broke into the building, probably near the epoch of Judah’s Babylonian captivity, so late as 600 B.C.; and for them, see further on to our Part IV.

That the ancient, idolatrous, Egyptians themselves, as a people (probably from 2100 B.C., down to their most theotechnic Theban kingdom about 1700 B.C.; thence to their conquest while still worshipping bulls, goats, cats, and crocodiles by Persian Cambyses in 525 B.C.; then conquered again, when worshipping onions, dogs and wolves as well, by Grecian Alexander in 338 B.C.; and then by Julius Cæsar, when no better, in 48 B.C.), that they all knew thus much, we may readily allow, because they could hardly have known less of the interior than their latest conquerors, the Romans; and there is, or was recently, credible proof, in the shape of good uncial letters marked in carbon, and recorded to have been seen by Signor Caviglia when he first recovered in modern times the re-entry to that lower part of the Pyramid, that they, the Imperial Romans, were once inside the subterranean chamber, and did so mark its smooth ceiling, standing and scrambling amongst the stones of its unfinished floor.

There appears also, as it is asserted by a few modern Egyptologists of rather a sanguine turn of mind, no small probability that some kinds of Pyramids with this 102single characteristic—viz. a descending entrance-passage and subterranean, or, if you will, call it positively, as they are so fond of doing, a tombic or sepulchral, chamber—were indigenous in Egypt before the erection of the Great Pyramid. In such case, therefore, that building may have been begun so far, in seeming deference to some contemporary, and by no means secret, native ideas about burial; though as will be seen now, the Great Monument did not care to complete them; nor to carry out the either intended, or pretended, sepulchral chamber to such a condition of floor state, that any funeral sarcophagus could have been decently, and in order, established there: while no remains of any kind of coffin have ever been reported to have been found either in that chamber or the passage leading to it.

In the undoubtedly subsequent second and third Jeezeh Pyramids, on the contrary, their subterranean rooms were finished, floors and all; and sarcophagi were introduced. Their architects, moreover, attempted to make those chambers, the only interiors those pyramids possessed, notably object-worthy. But it was only with useless, confusing complication, without any very sensible purpose; unless when it was to allow a second king to make himself a burial-chamber in the Pyramid cellar already occupied by a predecessor; and then it was bad. Gradually, therefore, as the researches of Colonel Howard-Vyse have shown, on the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth Jeezeh Pyramids (all these being, moreover, very small ones: see Plate IV.), the native Egyptians dropped nearly everything else that they had been exercised on, or had been allowed to learn, at the building of the Great Monument, except the one single, descending and generally sloping passage, with an unfinished subterranean chamber at its farther end. Such a passage and chamber, but well-finished chamber, and 103therefore more probably copied from old native custom, they always made under their own little Pyramids; used them distinctly for burial purposes; and that use of them and nothing but it, they kept to, so long as they practised their petty pyramid-building at all (down to, perhaps, 1800 B.C.). (See Plate V.)

Lepsius's Law of early Egyptian Pyramid Building.

Still further, that the making of such descending passages with subterranean chambers, and using them for sepulture, is precisely what the profane Egyptians usually did when they were their own masters and the directors of their own works; and that they did little else even in subsequent times of increased national numbers and wealth, except it was to decorate them with images of false gods, boasting inscriptions in hieroglyphic writing, and portraits of themselves, is also testified to from quite another quarter. For all the Egyptologists of our age, French, English, German, and American, have hailed the advent, on their stage of time, of the so-called “Lepsius's Law of the Egyptian Pyramid Building”; they universally declaring that it satisfies absolutely all the observed or known phenomena. And it may do so for every known case of every Pyramid throughout the land of Egypt, except the Great Pyramid; and there it is antagonized at every point.

Taking, however, the cases which the law does apply to, viz. all the smaller, profane Egyptian examples, this alleged “law” of Lepsius pronounces, that the sole object of any of its Pyramids was, to form a royal tomb—subterranean as a matter of course—and that operations began, by making an inclined descending passage leading down into the subjacent rock, and there, at the end of it (many feet under the surface), 104cutting out an underground chamber. The scheme for the interior thus begun below, went on also growing above ground for exterior purposes every year of the King's reign, by the placing there of a new or additional layer of building-stones, and piling them layer above layer over, and around, a central, square-based nucleus upon the levelled ground, vertically above the one, commencing, subterranean apartment. And this succeeding superincumbent mass of masonry was finally finished off, on that king's death, by his successor; who then deposited his predecessor's body, embalmed and in a grand sarcophagus, in the underground chamber; next stopped up the passage leading thereto, cased in the rude converging exterior sides of the whole building with bevelled casing-stones so as to give it a smooth, as well as pyramidal, form, and left it in fact a finished, Lepsian, profane-Egyptian, and Pharaonic, or Royal tombic Pyramid to all posterity.¹ No mean

"The principle of their (the ancient Egyptians) pyramid construction was discovered by Mr. James Wild, the architect who accompanied the Prussian expedition. A rocky site was first chosen, and a space made smooth, except a slight eminence in the centre, to form a peg upon which the structure should be fixed. Within the rock, and usually below the level of the future base, a sepulchral chamber was excavated, with a passage, inclining downwards, leading to it from the north. Upon the rock was first raised a moderate mass of masonry, of nearly a cubic form, but having its four sides inclined inwards; upon this a similar mass was placed, and around, other such masses, generally about half as wide. At this stage the edifice could be completed by a small pyramidal structure being raised on the top, and the sides of the steps filled in, the whole being ultimately cased, and the entrance-passage, which had of course been continued through the masonry, securely closed; or else the work could be continued on the same principle. In this manner it was possible 105realisation either, as such, of once-prevailing ideas among some ancient nations, of burying their monarchs sub montibus altis, in impressive quiet, immovable calm, and deep in the bosom of mother earth.

But was there nothing more than, or rather not by any means so much as, that inside the Great Pyramid? Did the builders there go on piling the stones of its exterior to a greater height than in any other Pyramid, when the very first requirement anywhere, of a fully excavated sepulchral chamber had never been completed, —if they also worked by Lepsius's Egyptologic law?

Classic Antiquity on the Interior of the Great Pyramid.

There has been some scholastic question of late years as to whether Herodotus in 445 B.C., Strabo 18 A.D., Pliny 70 A.D., and others of the more mediæval ancients, or their immediate informants, were ever actually inside the Great Pyramid; for sometimes it has been maintained that the edifice was inviolably sealed, and that what they mentioned of the interior was only on the reports of tradition; while at other times it is averred that they must have seen something more accurately than through others' eyes, in order to have described so graphically as they did; describing, however, always a vast deal more about the exterior than the interior. The very utmost, indeed, that they had to say about the latter was touching a certain removable stone on

Mr. James Wild is, I believe, a Swiss by birth, and is still, in his native land, greatly interested in the Pyramid subject, as I was informed in 1875 by one of his sons, engaged then professionally in rebuilding the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Another son has been employed by this country as Secretary to the scientific staff on board the Challenger exploring ship. 106the outside, and then a dark groping “ usque ad,” or right away to, apparently, and by one passage only, the unfinished subterranean chamber, and nothing but that,— where M. Caviglia in A.D. 1820, as already mentioned, found blackened Roman letters, upon its roof;² things found in these days nowhere else inside the whole building.

To that one underground room, then, and through that then well-known entrance passage leading to it, of the Great Pyramid, occasionally (and probably only at long intervals) some individuals of the classic portion of antiquity, did penetrate, aided by the removable block of stone. The machinery of the block, and the opportunity of sometimes working it, seemed to act as a safety-valve to the Pyramid-curiosity of early times, which was thus admitted on rare and special occasions to see all the supposed interior of the greatest of all the Pyramids; and prove that there was nothing there! For, after stifling exertions, in a long, dark, narrow, steep and dangerous way, men saw and made acquaintance with—what? Nothing but a subterranean chamber, not so good as those in many smaller Pyramids. That subterranean chamber, which ought to have been the first thing finished, according to both all ancient Egyptian ideas, and the “Lepsius Law” of profane Egyptian-Pyramid building,—but was not. The very chamber which ought to have contained, for a real, unmitigated, idolatrous Pharaoh, sculptured sarcophagus, mummy, paintings, and inscriptions,—but which only really held the rough, natural rock-contents of the lower part of the room, not yet cut out of the bowels of the mountain.

In short, all the classic and idolatrous nations of old (say, from 1400 B.C. to 300 A.D.) knew nothing 107whatever about the now known real interior of the Great Pyramid's scientific and, as we shall venture also to call it, for far other than mere science reasons alone, sacred, design; and which interior lies altogether above, and in quite a different direction from, the unimportant and unfinished, subterranean chamber which profane eyes might regard without harm and without profit either; but about which we, as they did see it, have been obliged, at starting, to say so much.

Between the Classic and the Arabian days.

After the Classic came very dark ages; and though a revived and considerably altered school of Greek learning did flourish for a while at Alexandria, no additional knowledge about the interior of the Great Pyramid was gained there. But, in fact, neither the æsthetics and philosophy of Greece, nor the legality and imperial rule of Rome, as the final outcome of their long civilizations, could excuse any longer men's continued adherence to their older idolatries; and the Great Pyramid's unadorned and truthful sides stood out always against, and were an aversion to, idolaters of every kind, whether learned or unlearned.

The Christian religion too, though it had appeared in Egypt, was soon largely perverted there by the pagan and mythologic tendencies around. It had, also, in those days its own peculiar struggles, persecutions, dangers to pass through; its freethinkers, moreover, to resist, as in the case of Proclus, in or about 450 A.D. Though an apostate from the true faith, and exceedingly bitter against it, witness his very rationalistic book on the eternity of the earth and Nature, entitled most malignantly, "Eighteen Arguments against the Christians,"—this same Proclus has been recently brought up with honour by a London magazine, as a chief authority on 108the Great Pyramid, and for establishing that it was built by King Cheops for promoting astrological speculations about his own life.

But there is nothing to show that Proclus had any real acquaintance with the building itself. He may have picked up from the peasants around some of the folk-lore tales, such as always grow with time about any giant edifice of the past: and then, being an astrologer himself, he claimed King Cheops, of the mighty Pyramid, as devoted to the same vanity. But he is so little of an authority to be followed, that Gibbon wrote of Proclus,—“‘ his life exhibits a deplorable picture of the second childhood of human reason.”

Mediæval Arabians take their turn.

Meanwhile poor Christianity, though it overcame its first opponents, and flourished for a while in the Egyptian land, yet in its prosperity there became utterly adulterated; and it did not succeed either in reforming Cæsar, or governing the nations; except in so far as men had already begun to mould and hypocritically pervert it to their own political purposes, in almost mockery of its real precepts and Gospel of salvation to each individual, poor, and contrite soul. Again, too, had the theotechnic arts of the old Egyptians overlaid the spiritual purity of the worship of the one God; and so-called Christian churches were filled with figures and pictures of men deified by men themselves. So the cup of Divine wrath was found filled to the brim by the time that six centuries after Christ had come and gone; when, another bottomless pit (Rev. ix. 2—11) of infinitely greater significance than the subterranean, floorless hole under the Great Pyramid, was opened, “and there came a smoke out of that pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.” (Rev. ix. 2.)

109“And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth,—in shape like unto horses prepared for battle; their faces were as the faces of men, and their teeth like the teeth of lions, and their King was the angel of the bottomless pit.” No king, therefore, of the ordinary sort, or military-heroic type governed them, but a religious teacher of a new order, though it might be a wrong and perverse one; and teaching more by slaughtering with the sword than convincing by loving and persuasive speech.

So too it was, that Mohammed, or his general, with the Saracen horsemen behind him, soon after 622 A.D., swept over the Egyptian country, from Alexandria to Syene, like a destroying pestilence from God; visiting with instant death by the sword; slaying whoever they found, whether of old mythologists of any nation whatever, or debased Christians, who still worshipped “devils and idols of gold and silver and brass and wood and stone, which can neither see nor hear nor walk.” (Rev. ix. 20.)

Then was lost, together with their idolatrous religions, even the little of what was once known by ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt too, of the interior, and even the mode of limited entrance into the isolated subterranean chamber of the Great Pyramid. That mighty building was therefore left to itself, in the desert, apart and alone from man; a gigantic rock, a “terrible crystal” of a former unknown time.

But the Saracenic thunderstorm of Divine and long fore-ordained vengeance passed away at last; its days of butchery were shortened by Divine mercy; the Scorpion warriors with the horse-tail standards over their scimitar-armed ranks, having put down all apparent opposition, or performed their ordained parts in an idol worshipping world, began to turn towards arts of peace and the sweet enjoyment of their war-acquired wealth; so that presently civilized human history reopened under 110their altered rule, for an advancing age, with a new people in power, and new ideas dominant. How new they were, in Egypt more especially, must appear from this, that the fiercest discussions concerned now little more than the force of the simple name of God, and the virtue of praying five times a day looking towards Mecca,—a semi-spiritualized state of society in which a conquering Alexander the Great, or equally a learned Aristotle would have found himself out of place indeed.

The religious successors of Mohammed, the Caliphs of Bagdad, were now the chief potentates of the world, the most civilised too, and were daily becoming more so. Losing, indeed, as the years went on, more and more of their former distinctive character and divinely allowed purpose in the world,—for they sought now, not so much to extend the doctrines of their own almost worshipped prophet, as to enjoy themselves. Some few of them, too, doing so rather intelligently and intellectually. Thus at last, in 820 A.D., came the Caliph Al Mamoun, a caliph with an inquiring turn of mind, like his father Haroun Al Raschid, of the “Arabian Nights,” but attending to some higher things—(indeed he was said by Gibbon to have been a prince of rare learning, “continually exhorting his subjects,” in excelsior vein, “assiduously to peruse instructive writings; and who not only commanded the volumes of Grecian sages to be translated into Arabic, but could assist with pleasure and modesty at the assemblies and disputations of the learned”). When, therefore, this British-Association-for-the-advancement-of-Science genius of his day, coming down from Bagdad to El Fostat, an earlier Cairo, and in sight of the Great Pyramid just across the flood of Nile, proposed to enter that monument, A.D. 820, and behold the wonders of its interior, there seems to have survived only a very indistinct rumour to guide him towards trying the northern, rather than any other, side of the monument. 111But Al Mamoun, the directly Mohammed-descended ruler of the world of the “faithful,” and of all that physically defined portion of it which produced their two most valued fruits, water-melons and dates,—was likewise, in a new kind of profanity then growing up around him, flattered almost as a god in the rhapsodies of his court poets. They, inventing some new pleasure for him every day, could only not give him, turned inside out to the light of day, the Great Pyramid itself. Emulating, however, on a basis of Coptic tradition and post-classic, folk-lore, derived from the then innumerable, though degraded and again almost idolatrous, Egyptian monasteries, the enchanting tales of Bagdad,—they tried to do so; and drew gorgeous Eastern pictures of the contents of a wonderful interior of the Pyramid; with an astounding history for that mighty and mysterious triangular masonic fact; standing, as it did, before them on the Jeezeh hill so patent as to its exterior in the eyes of all the Memphite land; so recluse as to its interior against both the world and time.

In describing these new and strange interior matters, which might have pleased another Proclus, but merely prove to us that the reciters knew nothing about the Great Pyramid,—they seemed only intent on putting into it everything of value they could possibly think of. All the treasures of “Sheddad Ben Ad,” the great antediluvian king of the earth, with all his medicines and all his sciences, they declared were there, told over and over again. Others of them were positive that the founder-king was no other than Saurid Ibn Salhouk, a far greater one than Ben Ad; and these last gave many more minute particulars: some of which are at least interesting to us in the present day, as proving that amongst the Egypto-Arabians of more than 1,000 years ago, the Jeezeh Pyramids, headed too by the grand one, enjoyed a pre-eminence of fame vastly before all the 112other Pyramids of Egypt put together. And that if any other is alluded to after the Great Pyramid (which has always been the notable and favourite one, and chiefly was known then as the East Pyramid), it is either the second one at Jeezeh, under the name of the West Pyramid; or the third one, distinguished as the Coloured Pyramid, in allusion to its red granite, compared with the white lime-stone, casings of the other two. Those other two, moreover, from their somewhat near, though by no means exact, equality of size, went frequently under the affectionate designation of “the pair.”

But what seemed more to the purpose of Al Mamoun at the time, was the very exact report of Ibn Abd Alkokm, as to things then still to be found in each of these three Pyramids; for this was what, according to that most detailed author, the primeval King Saurid had conscientiously put into them and safely locked up; though where in the scanty hollow interior of any, or all, of the Pyramids, he could have found space for so much, is more than any one now knows.

“In the Western Pyramid, thirty treasuries, filled with store of riches and utensils, and with signatures made of precious stones, and with instruments of iron, and vessels of earth, and with arms which rust not, and with glass which might be bended and yet not broken, and with strange spells, and with several kinds of alakakirs (magical precious stones), single and double, and with deadly poisons, and with other things besides.

“He made also in the East Pyramid divers celestial spheres and stars, and what they severally operate in their aspects, and the perfumes which are to be used to them, and the books which treat of these matters.

“He put also into the Coloured Pyramid the commentaries of the priests in chests of black marble, and with every priest a book, in which the wonders of his 113profession, and of his actions, and of his nature were written; and what was done in his time, and what is and what shall be from the beginning of time to the end of it.

“He placed in every Pyramid a treasurer; the treasurer of the Westerly Pyramid was a statue of marble stone, standing upright with a lance, and upon his head a serpent wreathed. He that came near it, and stood still, the serpent bit him of one side, and wreathing round about his throat, and killing him, returned to his place. He made the treasurer of the East Pyramid an idol of black agate, his eyes open and shining, sitting on a throne with a lance; when any looked upon him, he heard on one side of him a voice which took away his sense, so that he fell prostrate upon his face, and ceased not, till he died.

“He made the treasurer of the Coloured Pyramid a statue of stone, called Albut, sitting; he which looked towards it was drawn by the statue, till he stuck to it, and could not be separated from it till such time as he died.”

Some of these features were certainly not encouraging; but then they were qualified by other tale-reciters, who described “three marble columns in the Great Pyramid, supporting the images of three birds in flames of fire made up of precious stones beyond all value and all number. Upon the first column was the figure of a dove, formed of a beautiful and priceless green stone; upon the second that of a hawk, of yellow stone; and upon the third, the image of a cock, of red stone, whose eyes enlightened all the place. Upon moving the hawk, a gigantic door which was opposite, composed of great marble slabs, beautifully put together, and inscribed with unknown characters in letters of gold, was raised; and the same surprising connection existed between the other images and their doors.”

114Exciting wonders, of course, appeared beyond those strange portals; but what need we to disentomb these Arabian romances further? In Egypt they believe pretty seriously in enchantments and Jinn or Genii of marvellous proportions and wonderful powers still; how much more then in the days of the son of Haroun Al Raschid, and when the Great Pyramid was an absolute mystery of old, still fast sealed! To ascertain, therefore, what really existed inside it in his own time was evidently a very natural idea; and why should not the young Caliph Al Mamoun undertake it?

Caliph Al Mamoun attacks the Northern Flank of the Great Pyramid.

He did so, and directed his Mohammedan workmen to begin at the middle of the northern side; precisely, says Sir Gardner Wilkinson, as the founders of the Great Pyramid had foreseen, when they placed the entrance, not in the middle of that side, but twenty-four feet and some inches away to the east, as well as many feet above the ground level. Hard labour, therefore, was it to these masons, quarrying with the rude instruments of that barbarous time, into stone-work as solid almost before them as the side of a hill.

They soon indeed began to cry out, “Open that wonderful Pyramid! It could not possibly be done!” But the Caliph only replied, “I will have it most certainly done.” So his followers perforce had to quarry on unceasingly by night and by day. Weeks after weeks, and months too, were consumed in these toilsome exertions; the progress, however, though slow, was so persevering that they had penetrated at length to no less than one hundred feet in depth from the entrance. But by that time becoming thoroughly exhausted, and beginning again to despair of the hard and hitherto fruitless 115labour, some of them ventured to remember certain improving tales of an old king, who had found, on making the calculation, that all the wealth of Egypt in his time would not enable him to destroy one of the Pyramids. These murmuring disciples of the Arabian prophet were thus almost becoming openly rebellious, when one day, in the midst of their various counsel, they heard a great stone evidently fall in some hollow space within no more than a few feet on one side of them!

In the fall of that particular stone, there almost seems to have been an accident that was more than an accident.

Energetically, however, they instantly pushed on in the direction of the strange noise; hammers, and fire, and vinegar being employed again and again, until, breaking through a wall surface, they burst into the hollow way, “exceeding dark, dreadful to look at, and difficult to pass,” they said at first, where the sound had occurred. It was the same hollow way, or properly the Pyramid's inclined and descending entrance-passage, where the Romans of old, and if they, also Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians, must have passed up and down in their occasional visits to the useless, barren subterranean chamber and its unfinished, unquarried-out, floor. Tame and simple used that entrance-passage to appear to those ancients who entered in that way, and before the builder intended; but now it not only stood before another race, and another religion, but with something that the others never saw, viz. its chief leading secret, for the first time since the foundation of the building, nakedly exposed: and exhibiting the beginning of an internal arrangement in the Great Pyramid which is not only unknown in any and every other Pyramid in Egypt, but which the architect here, carefully finished, scrupulously perfected, and then most remarkably sealed up before he left the building to 116fulfil its prophetic destination at the end of its appointed thousands of years. A large angular-fitting stone that had made for ages, with its lower flat side, a smooth and polished portion of the ceiling of the inclined and narrow entrance-passage, quite undistinguishable from any other part of the whole of its line, had now dropped on to the floor before their eyes; and revealed that there was just behind it, or at and in that point of the ceiling which it had covered, the end of another passage, clearly ascending therefrom and towards the south, out of this also southward going but descending one! (See Plate IX.)

But that ascending passage itself was still closed a little further up, by an adamantine portcullis, or rather stopper, formed by a series of huge granite plugs of square wedge-like shape dropped, or slided down, and then jammed in immovably, from above. To break them in pieces within the confined entrance-passage space, and pull out the fragments there, was entirely out of the question; so the grim crew of Saracen Mussulmans broke away sideways or round about to the west through the smaller, ordinary masonry, and so up again (by a huge chasm still to be seen, and indeed still used by all would-be entrants into the further interior) to the newly discovered ascending passage, at a point past the terrific hardness of its lower granite obstruction. They did up there, or at an elevation above, and a position beyond the portcullis, find the passage-way still blocked, but the filling material at that part was only lime-stone; so, making themselves a very great hole in the masonry along the western side, they there wielded their tools with energy on the long fair blocks which presented themselves to their view. But as fast as they broke up and pulled out the pieces of one of the blocks in this strange ascending passage, other blocks above it, also of a bore just to fill its full 117dimensions, slided down from above, and still what should be the passage for human locomotion was solid stone filling. No help, however, for the workmen. The Commander of the Faithful is present, and insists that, whatever the number of stone plugs still to come down from the mysterious reservoir, his men shall hammer and hammer them, one after the other, and bit by bit to little pieces at the only opening where they can get at them, until they do at last come to the end of all. So the people tire, but the work goes on; and at last, yes! at last! the ascending passage, beginning just above the granite portcullis, and leading thence upward and to the south, is announced to be free from obstruction and ready for essay. Then, by Allah, they shouted, the treasures of the Great Pyramid, sealed up from the fabulous times of the mighty Ibn Salhouk, and undesecrated, as it was long supposed, by mortal eye during all the intervening thousands of years, lay full in their grasp before them.

On they rushed, that bearded crew, thirsting for the promised wealth. Up no less than 110 feet of the steep incline, crouched hands and knees and chin together, through a passage of royally polished white lime-stone, but only 47 inches in height and 41 in breadth, they had painfully to crawl, with their torches burning low. Then suddenly they emerge into a long tall gallery, of seven times the passage height, but all black as night and in a death-like calm (see Plate XIII.); still ascending though at the strange steep angle, and leading them away farther and still more far into the very inmost heart of darkness of this imprisoning mountain of stone. In front of them, at first entering into this part of the now termed “Grand Gallery,” and on the level, see another low passage; on their right hand (see Plates IX. and XII.) a black; ominous-looking well’s mouth, more than 140 feet deep, and not reaching water, but only lower 118darkness, even then; while onwards and above them, a continuation of the glorious gallery or upward rising hall of seven times, leading them on, as they expected, to the possession of all the treasures of the great ones of antediluvian times. Narrow, certainly, was the way—only 6 feet broad anywhere, and contracted to 3 feet at the floor—but 28 feet high, or almost above the power of their smoky lights to illuminate; and of polished, glistering, marble-like, cyclopean stone throughout. (See Plate XIII.)

That must surely, thought they, be the high-road to fortune and wealth. Up and up its long-ascending floor-line, therefore, ascending at an angle of 26°, these determined marauders, with their lurid fire-lights, had to push their dangerous and slippery way for 150 feet of distance more; then an obstructing three-foot step to climb over (what could the architect have meant by making a step so tall as that?); next a low doorway to bow their heads most humbly beneath (see Plates XIV. and XVI.); then a hanging portcullis to pass, almost to creep, under, most submissively; then another low doorway, in awful blocks of frowning red granite both on either side, and above and below. But after that, they leaped without further let or hindrance at once into the grand chamber, which was, and is still, the conclusion of everything forming the Great Pyramid's interior; the chamber to which, and for which, and towards which, according to every subsequent writer (for no older ones knew any fragment of a thing about it), in whatever other theoretical point he may differ from his modern fellows,—the whole Great Pyramid was originally built. (See Plate XVII.)

And what find they there, those maddened Muslim in Caliph Al Mamoun's train? A right noble apartment, now called the King's Chamber, roughly 34 feet long, 17 broad, and 19 high, of polished red granite 119throughout, both walls, floor, and ceiling; in blocks squared and true, and put together with such exquisite skill that no autocrat Emperor of recent times could desire anything more solidly noble and at the same time beautifully refined.

Ay, ay, no doubt a well-built room, and a handsome one too; but what does it contain? Where is the treasure? The treasure! yes, indeed, where are the promised silver and gold, the jewels and the arms? The plundering fanatics look wildly around them, but can see nothing, not a single dirhem anywhere. They trim their torches, and carry them again and again to every part of that red-walled, flinty hall, but without any better success. Nought but pure, polished red granite, in mighty slabs, looks calmly upon them from every side. The room is clean, garnished too, as it were; and, according to the ideas of its founders, complete and perfectly ready for its visitors, so long expected, and not arrived yet; for the gross minds who occupy it now, find it all barren; and declare that there is nothing whatever of value there, in the whole extent of the apartment from one end to another; nothing, except an empty stone chest without a lid.

The Caliph Al Mamoun was thunderstruck. He had arrived at the very ultimate part of the interior of the Great Pyramid he had so long desired to take possession of; and had now, on at last carrying it by storm, found absolutely nothing that he could make any use of, or saw the smallest value in. So being signally defeated, though a Commander of the Faithful, his people began plotting against him.

But Al Mamoun was a Caliph of the able day of Eastern rulers for managing mankind; so he had a large sum of money secretly brought from his treasury, and buried by night in a certain spot near the end of his own quarried entrance-hole. Next day he caused the 120men to dig precisely there, and behold! although they were only digging in the Pyramid masonry just as they had been doing during so many previous days, yet on this day they found a treasure of gold; “and the Caliph ordered it to be counted, and lo! it amounted to the exact sum that had been incurred in the works, neither more nor less. And the Caliph was astonished, and said he could not understand how the kings of the Pyramid of old, actually before the Deluge, could have known exactly how much money he would have expended in his undertaking; and he was lost in surprise.” But as the workmen got paid for their labour, and cared not whose gold they were paid with so long as they did get their wage, they ceased their complaints, and dispersed; while as for the Caliph, he returned to the city, El Fostat, notably subdued, musing on the wonderful events that had happened; and both the Grand Gallery, the King’s Chamber, and the “stone chest without a lid” were troubled by him no more.

The poets of El Fostat did indeed tune their lutes once again, and celebrate their learned patron’s discoveries in that lidless box of granite. According to some of them, a dead man with a breast-plate of gold, and an emerald vase a foot in diameter, and “a carbuncle which shone with a light like the light of day, and a sword of inestimable value and 7 spans long, with a coat of mail 12 spans in length” (all of them very unlike an Egyptian mummy of the usual Egyptological type), rewarded his exertions; though, according to others, the chest was really crammed to the brim with coined gold “in very large pieces”; while on the cover, which others again maintained was not there then, and is certainly not to be seen now, was written, they positively averred, in Arabic characters, “Abou Amad built this Pyramid in 1,000 days.”

But nothing further of importance was actually done, 121at that time or for long after, in a cause which men began now to deem, in spite of lying poets, to be absolutely worthless, and in a region more profitless to all mere sensualists than the desert itself. The way of approach, indeed, once opened, though no more traversed, by the Caliph Al Mamoun (as he presently left Egypt for his more imperial residence in Bagdad, and ended his days there in 842 A.D., about forty years before the time of our Alfred the Great), that way into the Great Pyramid then remained free to all; and “men did occasionally enter it,” says one of the honestest chroniclers of that period, “for many years, and descended by the slippery passage which is in it”; but with no other alleged result, to all those benighted followers of an iniquitously false and contemptuously anti-Christian, prophet, than this, “that some of them came out safe, and others died.”