26 The Great Pyramid ef Egypt. [January, 



are tombs of the same or closely following ages, where you 

 may still see lime-stone door-posts and ceilings of rock- 

 excavated tombs carved in imitation of palm-tree trunks, 

 while the basalt sarcophagus of the third Pyramid was 

 elaborately chiselled in imitation of a very neat piece of 

 "joiner's " work. 



Still, however, and even allowing a general wooden archi- 

 tecture to have prevailed amongst all men previous to the 

 date of the Great Pyramid, there is left to the startlingly 

 new-light invention of that building's unknown architect, the 

 mighty change, the bizarre revolution from slight, tough, easily- 

 worked, perishable wood, to the use of hard, brittle, heavy, 

 lasting stone ; and he, too, who made that invention then and 

 there, made it suddenly, at once and perfectly, for there is no 

 trace throughout all the details of that monument of any de- 

 pendence on the previously customary forms when men were 

 working in a totally different material. And yet precisely 

 such a slavery of thought and poverty of invention did pre- 

 vail everywhere else, even into long subsequent ages. Thus 

 the finest Grecian temples may be objected to aesthetically 

 for their frequent imitation of soft, pliant forms of vegetable 

 origin in stone material. The earliest Buddhist temples, 

 also, for their circular enclosures of stones cut most expen- 

 sively into the shape of mere wooden posts and rails ; while 

 idolatrous Egyptian buildings, at Thebes and Philaa, were 

 positively heinous in their persistent use of stone pillars 

 carved and painted in imitation of the most succulent, and 

 squashy of all watery reeds. 



But the Great Pyramid is in this assthetical respect as 

 faultless in its whole as in its parts ; for what is not its 

 whole but a reproduction on the grandest scale of the form, 

 true and simple through its whole extent, of a crystal ; or of 

 the very ideal of mineral substance refined and perfected ; 

 the emblem, too, of light, splendour, method, purity, 

 power, eternity ! 



Again, therefore, a new test, not very scientific perhaps, 

 but brought up by others specially to lower the Great 

 Pyramid, is rather found, on close examination, to leave it 

 with an additional claim to unique distinction. 



6. The Lepsius-Wylde "Growing" Tomb Theory. 

 And now I would gladly go on to set before my readers 

 the modern scientific theory of the Great Pyramid and what 

 it rests on, but that with a monument which has looked 

 down on the whole course of known human history, from 

 before Nineveh to besieged Paris, and of which we have 



