i go The Great Pyramid in Egypt. [April, 



6. Internal Arrangements. 



Had the above tabular statement been extended so as to 

 contain descriptions also of the interior passages and 

 chambers of the Pyramids, more striking diversity still would 

 have been found between the great monument and its com- 

 panions. For though all of them have a descending entrance 

 passage with a chamber at the further end, i.e., the simple 

 tombic arrangement known to all men, none but the former 

 has an ascending passage and other chambers high up in the 

 sub-aerial masonry of the building. 



That ascending passage, with its consequences, is indeed 

 the chief constructive secret, as well as peculiarity, of the 

 Great Pyramid ; and a secret well kept too, for with the ex- 

 ception of its place having been broken into once, apparently 

 by some very ancient fanatics of the native race, the mystery 

 remained unknown to all other men, from the building's 

 primeval birth down to the year 800 A.D., when an accident, 

 often described' in books since then, disclosed the beginning 

 of the upward ascent to the Khaliph Al Mamoon, who was 

 quarrying at the moment close by. 



Yet was the arrangement not intended to escape posterity 

 for ever ; seeing that so soon as I began to measure the im- 

 portant, and otherwise regular, joint lines in the floor of the 

 descending passage both in mathematical manner and in 

 a respectful frame of mind for the original designer (a simple 

 combination, but which seems to have escaped previous 

 travellers), than I stumbled on, nay, started at, rather than 

 merely discovered, two lines that were altogether anomalous 

 in their angle, as well as peculiar in the extra hardness 

 of their stone material ; and behold ! they pointed to the 

 very place where, behind an apparently ordinary part of 

 the ceiling, and totally unsuspected by later Egyptians, 

 Ptolemasan Greeks, and Imperial Romans (who did pass 

 up and down the more ordinary descending passage) the 

 hidden ascending tube begins to take its mysterious rise. 

 More yet, too, of such hints had been left behind ; for only 

 a little way beyond the system of horizontal-angle trenches, 

 already alluded to, in front of the Eastern Side of the 

 Great Pyramid, there is a full sized model, in everything but 

 length, of the said Pyramid's unique system of both descend- 

 ing and ascending passages, cut into the rock in a vertical 

 plane ; and with even a beginning of the greater breadth and 

 peculiar ramps of its grand gallery. 



But if the Great Pyramid has these additional hollow 

 spaces over and above what other Pyramids possess, must 



