CHAPTER IX.

DENSITY AND TEMPERATURE;

Of both Earth and Great Pyramid, from the Latest Measures.

THOUGH there be no inscriptions, yet is there much instruction on the interior walls of the Great Pyramid; and as the coffer, when taken merely by itself, has proved, thus far, too hard a riddle for our full interpretation, let us try something of the teaching of the walls which precede, as well as those which surround, it.

Ante-Chamber Granite Symbolisms.

In order to enter the Great Pyramid's so-called King's Chamber, we have to pass, from the Grand Gallery, through the "Ante-chamber." (Plates XIV. and XV.) It is very appropriately so called, because it is a little room which must be passed through before the King's Chamber can be entered or the coffer seen; and in passing through it, the attentive eye may note many more complicated forms there, than in any other part of the Great Pyramid. Amongst these notanda are certain vertical lines above the southern or further doorway.

Previous travellers have contradicted each other so abundantly about the number of these lines, that I was rather surprised to perceive them instantly to be not only confined to the number four, but these distinct, 167regular, parallel, extending the whole way evenly from ceiling to door-top,* and no less than 107.4 inches long, 2.8 inches deep, and 3.8 inches broad, each; with six-inch spaces between, and with similar six-inch spaces also between the outer side of each outermost line, and the bounding of the ante-room's South wall containing them.

Hence the lines were subservient to the spaces, and the whole arrangement appeared to me, not so much, though it is to a certain extent, a system of four lines, as an example of surface divided into five equal portions or spaces.

As the doorway is only 42 inches high, and the dividing lines of the wall above it are apparently drawn down to the doorway's (now broken) top, a man of ordinary height standing in the ante-room and looking southward (the direction he desires to go, in order to reach the King's Chamber), cannot fail (if he has a candle with him, for otherwise everything is in darkness here) to see this space divided into five. And when he bows his head very low, as he must do to pass under the said southern doorway of only 42 inches high, he bends his head submissively under that symbol of division into five; and should remember, that five is the first and most characteristic of the Pyramid numbers. (See Plate XVI.)

Travellers describe the Wall-courses of the King's Chamber.

Not without reason, therefore, was it, as the intelligent traveller may readily believe, that the architect of the Great Pyramid desired to impress that division into five upon every visitor's mind, just the last thing before

* That is to say, as nearly as a huge fracture of that lower corner of the granite block forming the doorway allowed me easily to judge in 1865: for within the limits of that fracture, Dr. Grant claims to have recently found proofs that the lower ends of the lines did not quite go through to the passage below, but ended in a short, curved bevel. 168such visitor should bow down, previously to passing through the low, solid doorway, cut out of granite 100 inches thick. But after that, rising up in the midst of the ultimate King's Chamber beyond—what should any and every beholder witness there?

According to that usually most correct of travellers, Professor Greaves, he says of the King's Chamber that everyone may see there "from the top of it descending to the bottom, there are but six ranges of stone, all which, being respectively sized to an equal height, very gracefully in one and the same altitude run round the room."

Well, though that is a very pretty arrangement, and the grace of it is perfectly true, it is not the accomplishment of a division into five; so let us try an older traveller, Sandys, of a curt and epigrammatic style, and writing in 1610. Says he, of the selfsame King's Chamber, "A right royal apartment, and so large that eight floors it, eight roofs it; eight stones flagge the ends and sixteen the sides." Worse and worse.

Says Dr. Pocock in 1743, "Six tiers of stones of equal breadth compose the sides"; which account M. Fourmont, on the part of Bourbon France, confirms in 1755 by laying down that "the walls are composed of six equal ranges." The still more famous traveller, Dr. Clarke, makes Cambridge in 1801 support Oxford in 1639, by particularising that "there are only six ranges of stone from the floor to the roof"; while, finally, that usually infallible author on Egypt, Mr. Lane, with his clever and industrious relatives, the Pooles, almost natives of Cairo, seem to set a seal for ever on the mistake by declaring, "Number of courses in the walls of the King's chamber, six."

What could have blinded all these duly warned men, and sent them following each other down one and the same too easy rut of simple, ridiculous error? Dr. 169Richardson, in 1817, was more original, if error apparently there must be in these dark-room investigations by candle-light in the interior of the Great Pyramid; for he chose a new and hitherto untrodden line of erring for himself, sententiously writing of the room, “Lined all around with broad flat stones, smooth and highly polished, each stone ascending from the floor to the ceiling.” But having once begun this new misdescription, he soon has followers; and we find the Lord Lindsay, of 1838, announcing, “A noble apartment, cased with enormous slabs of granite 20 feet high” (or a little more than the whole height of the room); and Sir William R. Wilde with his companion signing himself M.R.I.A., in 1837, equally publish to the world, as observed by themselves, “An oblong apartment, the sides of which are formed of enormous blocks of granite reaching from the floor to the ceiling.”

And yet, will it be credited that the walls of this chamber are divided into five horizontal courses, neither more nor less, almost four feet high each; and that these courses are most easy to count, as they must have been undoubtedly most expensive for the architect to construct; because every course is, as Professor Greaves so beautifully indicated, of the same height as every other, except, indeed (as I believe I was the first to point out), the lowest, which course is less than the rest by nearly 1-10th part, if measured from the floor; but is the same height if measured from the base of its own granite component blocks, which descend in the wall to beneath the floor’s level ?¹ (See Plate XVII.)

The really Pyramid Number of the King’s Chamber’s Wall-courses, and of Stones in them.

But I was not by any means the first person to find out that the courses in the walls of the King’s Chamber were five only, for the same thing had been noted by Lord Egmont in 1709, and Dr. Shaw in 1721, and perhaps by some others earlier or later; though no one previously to myself had, so far as I am aware, either fought against the world for the correctness of his observation, or connected the number with both the teaching of the architect in the ante-chamber, and the quinary character of the Pyramid’s first arithmetic.

Yet, quinary though it be for some purposes, it is decimal for others, as shown here in ‘almost juxtaposition; first, by the tenth part nearly, taken off the height of the lower course, by the manner of introduction of the floor; and then by the $10 \times 10$ number of stones, exactly, of which the walls of this beautiful chamber are composed. This latter circumstance was only recently announced, though on my publication of 1867, by Mr. Flinders Petrie; and does him all the more credit because, when I came to test the statement, there was one joint line, by mistake, too many in the middle course of the south wall in my engraved plate of the chamber, though the printed numbers were correct.

Since then again, Dr. Grant, Mr. Waynman Dixon, and other gentlemen have been out to the Great Pyramid specially to test this matter; and when from the floor upwards they had counted the stones of four courses, and found them 93, did they not rejoice to think what a huge error they would presently have against my statement in the second edition of this book! They did rejoice over the prospect—they have confessed that; but when they came to count the stones of the 171fifth and topmost course, they beheld, to their utter astonishment, that there were only seven blocks there; that seven making up the exact hundred, as well as signifying something further in that room touching 5.7, even as we shall presently be compelled to set forth.

A marked portion of the King's Chamber, and the Coffer, are mutually commensurable in Pyramid Numbers.

But the tenth part, nearly, taken off the visible height of the lower granite course of the chamber's walls; what was that for? Its first effect was to make that course, within the fraction of an inch, the same height as the coffer; and the second was, more exactly, to make the capacity, or cubic contents of that lowest course of the room, so decreased, equal to fifty times the cubic contents of the coffer, already shown to be 71,250. cubic Pyramid inches. Two separate sets of measured numbers in Pyramid inches for the length, breadth, and height, of that lowest chamber-course giving as follows, when divided by the coffer's contents—

And

Hence, close as was the connection of the several parts of the coffer with each other by the tie of capacity, equally close is the connection of the coffer with the adjusted course of the granite room in which it stands, and by capacity measure also. While, if the multiple before was 2, and is 50 now,—is not 50 twice 25, or double the number of its own inches in the cubit of the Great Pyramid, the significant $5 \times 5$?

Commensurabilities between the King's Chamber and the structural Masonry-courses of the whole Pyramid.

Neither did the fives and the tens of this chamber, on being examined, end here; for having been greatly struck outside the monument on contemplating the grandeur of the horizontal courses of masonry of which the whole Pyramid is built, I began next to study them by measure. Not at all equal to, but often violently different from, each other are these courses in their successive heights; but, whatever height or thickness of stones any one course is begun with, it is kept on at that thickness precisely, right through the whole Pyramid at that level (i.e. if we may judge of the unknown interior of the stratum by the four external edges thereof); though too the area of the horizontal section may amount to whole acres.

To secure this equality of thickness for a course,—in fact, just as with the equal height of the granite courses in the King's Chamber walls, but on a far larger scale,—it was plain that immense arrangements must have been instituted beforehand, with the masons of many quarries; and such arrangements imply method, mind, and, above all, intention. Wherefore, having measured the thickness of every component course of the Great Pyramid, one day in April, 1865, when ascending to the summit, and another day in descending, I compared and confirmed those figures with my own photographs of the building placed under a compound microscope; and also with similar numbers obtained from still more careful measures by the French Academicians in 1799 and 1800; and then began to sum up the courses' successive thicknesses to give the whole height of any particular number of courses. (See pp. 94, 95.)

On reaching in this manner the 50th course, lo! the total height of that stratum, or 1,690 inches, gave the 173hypsometrical level of the floor of the King's Chamber as well as it has yet been ascertained directly by all the best authorities. So that the level of the 50th course of construction of the whole Pyramid is the level also of that granite floor, whereon is resting the coffer, a vessel with commensurable capacity proportions between its inside and out, and its walls and floor, in a room with 5 courses, composed of 100 stones, and with a capacity proportion (the coffer) of 50, to the lowest of those courses; which lowest course has further been made 5 inches less in height than any of the others of its fellows.

Any person could hardly but see, then, that the so-called, in the dark ages, King's Chamber, should rather have been termed the chamber of the standard of 50. Can we also say, with reference to our present inquiry,—of 50 Pyramid inches employed in capacity-measure?

But what is a length of 50 Pyramid inches in the eye of Nature; and how ought that length to be employed for the highest order of capacity-measure purposes; i.e. an order which shall establish a harmonious relation between man's standards of capacity and weight, and the similar properties of the earth whereon he lives?

Fifty Pyramid inches form the one ten-millionth of the earth's axis of rotation; or decidedly the proper fraction to begin with for capacity measure, when we have already chosen one ten-millionth of the semi-axis for linear measure. The reason being, that in measuring linear distances, say amongst the spheres of heaven, men measure them from centre to centre, and therefore have only to take account of the radii of each; but in dealing with either their capacity or weight, we must take each sphere in its entirety, or from side to side, that is, by its diameter rather than radius.

More Symbolical Hints from the Ante-chamber.

Such is the answer to the first part of the question; and a hint how to deal with the second part may be gathered from some of the hitherto incomprehensible things in the little ante-chamber to this far grander chamber. Little indeed is the ante-chamber, when it measures only 65.2 inches in utmost breadth from east to west, 116.3 long from north to south, and 149.4 high; but it has a sort of granite wainscot on either side of it, full of detail; and was to me so complicated and troublesome a matter as to occupy three entire days in measuring. (See Plate XV.)

On the east side, this wainscot is only 103.1 inches high, and is flat and level on the top; but on the west side it is 111.8 inches high, and has three semi-cylindrical cross hollows of nine inches radius, cut down into it, and also back through its whole thickness of 8.5 to 11.7 inches to the wall. Each of those semi-cylindrical hollows stands over a broad, shallow, vertical, flat groove 21.6 inches wide, 3.2 inches deep, running from top to bottom of the wainscot, leaving a pilaster-like separation between them. The greater part of the said pilasters has indeed long since been hammered away, but their fractured places are easily traced; and with this allowance to researches in the present day, the groove and pilaster part of the arrangement is precisely repeated on the east side, within its lower compass of height.

These three grand, flat, vertical grooves, then, on either side of the narrow ante-chamber, have been pronounced long since by Egyptologists to be part of a vertically sliding portcullis system for the defence of the door of the King's Chamber. There are no blocks now to slide up and down in these grooves, nor have such things ever been seen there: but the gentlemen point 175triumphantly to a fourth groove, of a different order, existing to the north of all the others, indeed near the north-beginning of the ante-chamber; and with its portcullis block, they say, still suspended, and ready for work.

The Granite Leaf of the Ante-chamber.

That alleged portcullis block, however, contains many peculiarities which modern Egyptologists have never explained; and as it was first carefully described by Professor Greaves under the appellation of “the granite leaf,” (from the so-called “leaf” or “slat,” or sliding door over the water-way of a lock-gate in an English navigation canal), we had better keep to that name.

Its groove, instead of being 21.6 inches broad, like the others, is only 17.1 broad; and in place of being like them cut down to, and even several inches into, the floor, terminates 43.7 inches above that basal plane; so that the leaf’s block, or rather blocks—for it is in two pieces, one above the other—stand on solid stone of the walls on either side, and could not be immediately lowered to act as a portcullis, though an Emperor should desire it. Nor would they make a good portcullis if they were to be forcibly pushed, or chiselled down in their vertical plane, seeing that there are 21 inches free-end space between the leaf and the north entering wall and doorway, where a man might worm himself in, in front of that face of it; and 57. inches above the leaf’s utmost top, where several men might clamber over; and where I myself sat on a ladder, day after day, with lamps and measuring-rods, but in respectful silence and generally in absolute solitude, thinking over what it might mean.

The granite leaf is, therefore, even by the few data already given, a something which needs a vast deal more than a simple portcullis notion to explain it. And so do likewise the three broader empty pairs of grooves 176to the south of it, remarkable with their semi-cylindrical hollows on the west side of the chamber. Various ideas as to their uses have been given out from time to time, but none commended themselves to my mind at the place, more than that of the three dimensions necessary to express capacity contents—the three hollow curves, too, reminding of the curved shell of the earth’s surface; and the granite leaf with its double block (implying double power to its specific gravity) leading one then to think of the earth’s interior, or capacity, contents; for they are, when taken in the whole, of almost exactly double the mean density, or specific gravity, of that granite.

Earth’s Mean Density already approximately indicated, but required more exactly.

Here, then, from every side—from the coffer, the King’s Chamber, the Pyramid courses, and the ante-chamber trappings of stone—many of the very, and most scientific, and suitable items necessary for preparing earth reference capacity and weight measures were gradually cropping up in 1865 A.D., before earnest and attentive study of the actual Pyramid facts, to a quiet onlooker, measuring-rod in hand. But no mere linear measuring-rod can supply the further radical idea required for weight, if it is to have an earth-globe reference. The something else called for in this instance, in order to be true to the grandeur of the beginning made in the Pyramid linear system for length, could be no other than the mean density of the whole world; and this quantity is not yet by any means so intimately understood by every one, that it would be generally and instantly recognized the moment it should haply be seen, under some symbolical figure or numerical equivalent, in the Great Pyramid.

177Although, too, the earth’s mean density has been for long a subject of paramount interest throughout other most important and varied branches of natural philosophy, besides astronomy (and not only in this country, but the whole world over), yet it has been practically, diligently, successfully, studied by hardly any other nation than ourselves; and what we have done in the cause has been confined to very late times indeed.

The first special move, always excepting Sir Isaac Newton’s most sagacious guess in the absence of any experiment,² seems to have been made by Dr. Maskelyne in 1772; and hence came the celebrated experiment on the attraction of the plumb-line by Mount Schihallion, in Scotland; and whose ultimate computation gave for the concluded density of the whole earth 4.8; but with some suspicions that it might be still more. And finally, amongst such mountain determinations, came that of the Ordnance Survey in 1855 on the hill of Arthur’s Seat, near Edinburgh; which observations yielded, when put through the necessary computations, as they were most splendidly, by Captain Ross Clarke, R.E., the number 5.316.

Another species of experiment, not far removed in its nature from the above, was tried in 1826 by Mr. (now Sir) George B. Airy, Astronomer-Royal, Dr. Whewell, and the Rev. Richard Sheepshanks, by means of pendulum observations, at the top and bottom of a deep mine in Cornwall; but the proceeding at that time failed. Subsequently, in 1855, the case was taken up again by Sir G. B. Airy and his Greenwich assistants, 178in a mine near Newcastle. They were reinforced by the then new invention of sympathetic electric control between clocks at the top and bottom of the mine, and had much better, though still unexpectedly large, results —the mean density of the earth coming out, for them, $6.565$.

Natural Philosophy and Closet Determination of the Earth’s Mean Density.

The subject being thus so excessively difficult to obtain a close numerical result upon, even by the best modern astronomy, good service was done to the world in the course of the last century, when the Rev. John Mitchell proposed a different and a direct manner of trying the experiment actually between the several parts of one and the same piece of apparatus. He died, indeed, before he himself could practise his acute suggestion; but it was taken up after his death by the celebrated Cavendish, and worked very successfully in 1798, with a final result of $5.450$.

Nearly forty years after Cavendish’s great work, his experiment was repeated by Professor Reich, of Freyberg, in Saxony, with a result of $5.44$; and then came the grander repetition by the late Francis Baily, representing therein the Royal Astronomical Society of London, and, in fact, the British Government and the British nation.

With exquisite care did that well-versed and methodical observer proceed to his task; and yet his observations did not prosper.

Week after week, and month after month, unceasing measures were recorded; but only to show that some disturbing element was at work, overpowering the attraction of the larger on the smaller balls.

What could it be? 179Professor Reich was applied to, and requested to state how he had contrived to get the much greater degree of accordance with each other, that his published observations showed.

“Ah!” he explained, “he had had to reject all his earlier observations until he had guarded against variations of temperature by putting the whole apparatus into a cellar, and only looking at it with a telescope through a small hole in the door.”

Then it was remembered that a very similar plan had been adopted by Cavendish; who had furthermore left this note behind him for his successor’s attention—“that even still, or after all the precautions which he did take, minute variations and small exchanges of temperature between the large and small balls were the chief obstacles to full accuracy.”

Mr. Baily therefore adopted yet further, and very peculiar, means to prevent sudden changes of temperature in his observing-room; and then only did the anomalies vanish, and the real observations begin.

The full story of them, and all the particulars of every numerical entry, and the whole of the steps of calculation, are to be found in the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society, and constitute one of the most interesting volumes¹ of that important series; and its final result for the earth’s mean density was announced as

5.675, probable error $\pm$ 0.0038

The Ordnance Survey’s Arthur’s Seat experiment gave the same earth’s mean density as

5.316, probable error $\pm$ 0.054

And Sir George B. Airy’s mine experiment declared still the same earth’s same mean density to be

6.565, probable error $\pm$ 0.018 ¹: The fourteenth volume. 180From which naturally conflicting data, it will be seen that modern science, whatever it implies, by “probable error,” about its extreme accuracy to $\dfrac{1}{300}$ or less, cannot really be certain in this transcendentally difficult, but infinitely important, physical inquiry respecting the earth’s mean density to nearer than about $\dfrac{1}{6}$th of the whole quantity.

Earth’s Density Number in the Great Pyramid.

Now the Pyramid’s earth’s mean density comes out, if at all, most simply, and to an accuracy at once of three places of figures, certain; from,—the cubic contents of the coffer in Pyramid inches, divided by the 10th part of 50 inches cubed. Whence, trusting to my measures, it is:—71,250 divided by 12,500; the quotient being 5.70; a number which modern science may confirm, at some future day, and does meanwhile include near the very centre of its best results thus far. While the grand 5.7 of the seven stones forming the 5th and topmost course of the walls of this King’s Chamber, crown the conclusion on every side.³

Of Temperature Corrections, and how effected.

Some further questions, however, modern science already asks of Pyramidists, in order to ascertain whether, 181and how, certain precautions, which she thinks necessary in all her own important work, were taken, and still remain effective, in those primeval operations of the so long sealed-up interior of the Great Pyramid.

For instance, if the coffer has to be considered as to its weight contents in water (and water filling is so frequently an operation connecting capacity and weight measures), strict attention is necessary to temperature, an element, or condition usually supposed to be only amenable to the thermometers of the last 200 years; yet the smallest errors on the score of uncertainties of temperature (and we may say almost the same for variations of barometric pressure), in the ancient work, would have introduced unnumbered perplexities.

These perplexities, nevertheless, are far from being found in the Great Pyramid's Coffer. Not because the Pyramid architect either had, or left behind, any very superior mercurial thermometers; but because he employed a method overriding thermometers, and beginning now to be found preferable even by the highest science of our own day, its multitudes of most excellent thermometers, and barometers too of every kind, notwithstanding.

Thus the latest conclusion of the best geodesists, in conducting their modern standard-scale experiments, is expressed in the maxim, “Have as little to do with variations of temperature as possible”; for temperature is an insidious influence whose actions and reactions men will hardly ever hear the last of, if once they let it begin to move, vary, or be higher in one place than in another, or at one time than another. We have seen, too, already, how this feature went close to the annihilation of the Cavendish experiment and its repetitions; and that the only source of safety was, not any attempt by power of fine thermometers to observe the temperature differences, and compute the corrections; 182but, to cut down the variations of temperature themselves.

Hence that retreating into cellars, and closing of doors, and only looking in through small holes with telescopes, already described. Quite similarly too, in every astronomical observatory, where uniformity of clock-rate is prized, it has been the last, and practically the best, thing to that end yet found out,—that after the clockmaker has done everything which his art can do, in decreasing the disturbing effects which follow changes of temperature, by applying a so-called, and in truth very considerably effective, "temperature compensation pendulum,"—there is always a further improvement that can be effected in the going of the clock, by superadding certain influences of mass, simply to lessen the amount of heat-changes for such pendulum to try its artificially supplied compensating powers upon.

Thus, at the great observatory of Pulkova, near St. Petersburg, where they value an insight into small fractions of a second perhaps more than anywhere else in the wide world, the very able Russian astronomers have placed their chief clock in the "subterraneans," or cellars, of the observatory. Something of the same sort is now practised at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; while the Paris Observatory has beat them all by placing its clock no less than 95 feet under the surface of the ground, in the very peculiar "caves" which exist there.

Now, at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, there have been observations taken for many years of several large and very long-stemmed thermometers, whose bulbs have been let into the rock at various measured depths; and it is found that, notwithstanding the possibly disturbing effect of rain-water soaking down through fissures, there is such an astonishing power in 183a mass of stony matter to decrease temperature variations, that at the surface of the ground—

At 95 feet, then, from the surface, in the case of the Paris Observatory, how very slight and innocuous to the most refined observation must be the variation of season-temperature! But how much more slightly affected still, and how admirably suited to a scientific observing-room, must not the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid be, seeing that it is shielded from the outside summer heat and winter cold, by a thickness of nowhere less than 180 feet of solid masonry!

There is not, in truth, in any country of Europe, there never has been erected, and it does not look much as if there ever will be erected, by any nation under the sun, a scientific observing-room for closet experiments that can at all be compared in the very leading requisite for such an institution, with the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid; if indeed, as we shall presently see, it had only been allowed fair play in modern times.

Absolute Temperature of the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid.

All the knowledge and advance, then, of the present day, so far from improving on, or altering with advantage, cannot too much commend, copy, and adhere to, the uniformity arrangements for rendering constant the temperature of the Great Pyramid’s coffer chamber. But what is the degree of temperature so rendered constant?

It is apparently a very characteristic degree, and one 184which possesses otherwise some singular recommendations. In the Great Pyramid, as before observed, there is a grand tendency for numbers, things, and principles going by “fives”; and this seems carried out even in its temperature, for it may be described, first of all, as a temperature of one-fifth; that is, one-fifth the distance between the freezing and boiling points of water, above the former.

Observed Temperatures at, and near, the Great Pyramid.

The first grounds for this belief were certain approximate observations by M. Jomard, in the “Description de l’Égypte”; and which indicate something like 68° Fahr. as nearly the original temperature of the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, if under both ventilation and other intended normal circumstances of its foundation. And 68° Fahr. is precisely a temperature, by, and according to, Nature of one-fifth.

There is more, too, in the temperature numbers resulting for the Pyramid, than the mere accident of the mean earth-surface temperature of its particular parallel of latitude; for that quantity would in truth seem to be very sensibly higher, if observed at the low level of the generally inhabited country thereabout, than this pyramidal quantity of one-fifth. Not only, for instance, did M. Jomard actually find it so, seeing that he measured 25° Cent. = 77° Fahr. for the lower part of the “well” of the Great Pyramid, and also for several of the tombs in the open, sun-stricken plain in the neighbourhood; but my own much more numerous observations in 1864-5 on the temperature of wells in and about the city of Cairo (in winter and spring, and at a depth sufficient to give as near an annual average as possible) yielded on a mean of 12 of them, 69.9 Fahr. A quantity which is also the identical result for the mean annual atmospheric temperature of the same city, 185as obtained by the Austrian Meteorological Society from five years of ordinary air observation, A. Buchan, Esq., reporting.

Hence if the Great Pyramid was devised originally to stand, both in a latitude of 30° (see p. 79 to 82) and in a temperature of one-fifth, it was necessary that it should be mounted upon just such a hill as that whereon it does stand (and more particularly the King’s Chamber level of it), in a sensibly cooler stratum of the atmosphere than the inhabited plains below; reducing thereby 69°.9 to 68° Fahr.

Thirty-seven years too after M. Jomard had measured in the King’s Chamber the extra temperature of 71.6 Fahr. (i.e. 3.6 extra according to this subsequent theory), Colonel Howard-Vyse cleared out the two ventilating channels; and reported, without having heard any idea that the temperature had been theoretically too high—that instantly upon the channels being opened, the ventilation re-established itself, and with a feeling to those in the chamber of most agreeable coolness.

But no sooner had he left, than the Arabs most perversely stopped up the ventilating channels again. And now steam-navigation and the overland route are pouring in, day after day and year after year, continually increasing crowds of some decorous, but more uproarious, and determined Great Pyramid visitors; trooping with their candles and torches, and excited and various, but always heat-making (and sometimes stone-breaking, whether of walls or coffer), amusements into the King’s Chamber granite hall. For they will so particularly insist on rushing in there, rather than into any other part of the Great Pyramid. Wherefore in 1865 I found that chamber’s temperature more deranged than ever of old, or risen to no less than 75.2 Fahr.

On one occasion indeed, it was so much as 75.7; and 186that was immediately after a large party with extra lights, from some vulgar steamer, had had their whirling, stamping dances over, as they derisively declared, “old Cheops’ tombstone”; and had indulged to the full their ignorant cursing of his ancient name, amid shouting and laughter, and the painful accompaniment of the primeval coffer being banged with a big stone swung by Arab arms; regardless that its note is said by high authorities in that line, to be some precious standard of musical tone. And all that time the temperature was only 74° in the Queen’s Chamber below, and 73° at the dry-well mouth lower down still in the Pyramid. Simultaneous temperature numbers which evidently indicate an abnormal heat-elevating force at that instant in the King’s Chamber. And no wonder! At least to any one who should have looked in through the smoke and stifling dust upon any of those madding and multitudinous scenes of lurid-lighted revelry; indulged in, within so small a space and confined an air, by so many big pipe-smoking, tobacco-stinking, European men, and demon-like Arabs of every degree—black, brown, and grey—waiting on them and howling ever and anon for their own corruption of baksheesh.

Lamentable scenes surely to be beheld in such a chamber, and in the present educated and advanced age of the world. For they were certainly sights that would have utterly shocked poor Caliph Al Mamoun, who had, 1,000 years ago, but quite involuntarily, prepared the arena for them. And now, no one will attempt to put them down; for, as one informant told us, “This Egypt, is, in the present day, every man’s land; and every one is his own master when he comes out into the desert here; while in nothing is each individual so tenacious as his perfect right to enjoy himself in the Great Pyramid. The modern Pharaoh would be pulled rom his throne, if he attempted to interfere.”

Temperature and Pressure Data for the Coffer's Weight and Capacity Measure.

At the present moment, therefore, the coffer is no more of its right, or original, temperature, than its right and original size, when so much of it has been broken bodily away by the hammering of the representative men of modern money-making society and their attendant trains. But the barometric pressure in the chamber happily defies such power of disturbance, and keeps, by the law of the atmosphere over all that region, expressively close to 30.000 Pyramid inches.

Wherefore we correct our evidently perverted temperature observations slightly by theory, take the mean pressure as observed, and then have quite enough to justify us in assuming, as the original coffer and King's Chamber temperature of 4,040 years ago (and also what their temperature would be again were the ventilating channels reopened, and a strict prohibition issued in Scottish Covenanter phrase, against “promiscuous dancing” by all travellers, whether educated or ignorant; smoking narcotics,⁴ or not)—the number 68°o Fahr., or a temperature of one-fifth.

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188Wherefore at that temperature, and the atmospheric pressure previously mentioned, the coffer's 71,250 cubic Pyramid inches of capacity, filled with pure water, (though only as a temporary practical expedient for that mean earth-density of the interior of the planet which man can never hope to touch, though he may tell it in number)—do form the grand, earth-commensurable, weight standard of the ancient Great Pyramid.

What precise quantity of numerical weight, in our reckoning of tons or pounds, that will amount to, and what subdivisions of its grand standard the Pyramid system permits for commerce as well as science, we propose to take up further on,—after having devoted one more chapter to examining certain of our foundational Pyramid data of modern measured lengths and angles, reduced to their original values, more rigidly than ever.