214 Some Particulars of Discoveries in Egypt. 
entered the true passage, an opening four feet high and three 
feet and a half wide, formed by four blocks of granite, and 
continued descending at an angle of about 26° to the length of 
i04 feet five inches, lined all the length with granite. From this 
passage he had to remove the stones with which it was filled ; and 
at its bottom was a door or portcullis of granite (fitted into a 
niche also made of granite) supported at the height of eight inches 
by small stones placed under it. Two days were occupied in 
raising it high enough to admit of entrance. This door is one 
foot three inches thick, and with the granite niche occupies seven 
feet of the passage, where the granite work ends, and a short pas- 
‘sage, gradually ascending twenty-two feet seven inches towards the 
centre descending commences ; at the end of which is a perpen- 
dicular of fifteen feet. On the left is a small forced passage cut in 
the rock, and above on the right a forced passage running upward 
and turning to the north thirty feet, just over the portcullis: At 
the bottom of the perpendicular, after removing some rubbish, he 
found the entrance of another passage which inclined northward. 
But quitting this for the present, he followed his prime passage, 
‘which now took a horizontal direction, and at the end of it, 158 
feet eight inches from the above-mentioned perpendicular, he 
entered a chamber forty-six feet three inches long, sixteen feet 
three inches wide, and twenty -three feet six inches in height, for 
the greater part cut out of the rock; and in the middle of this 
room he found a sarcophagus of granite, eight feet long, three 
feet six inches wide, and two feet three inches deep inside, sur- 
rounded by large blocks of granite, as if to prevent its being re- 
moved. The lid had been opened, and he found in the interior 
a few bones which he supposed to be human: but some of them 
having been since brought to England by Capt. Fitzelarence, who 
was afterwards in this pyramid, and one of them (a thigh bone) 
having on examination by Sir Everard Home been found to have 
belonged to a cow, we may doubt whether any of them ever be- 
longed to a human subject. The size indeed of the coffin seems 
better fitted for the reception of a cow than of a man. 
On the west wall of this chamber is an Arabic inscription, testi- 
fying that this pyramid was opened by the Masters Mahomet El 
Aghar and Othman, and inspected in presence of the Sultan Ali 
Mahomet the Ist Ugloch (a Tartarie title, as Uleg Bey, &c.) ; 
and on other parts of the walls inscriptions supposed by M. Bel- 
zoni to be in Coptic. 
He now returned to the descending passage at the bottom of 
the above-mentioned perpendicular. Its angle is about 26°: at 
the end of forty-eight feet and a half it becomes horizontal, still 
going north fifty-five feet, ia the middle of which horizontal part 
there is a recess to the east eleven feet deep, and a passage he 
the 
