400 PROFESSOR C. PIAZZI SMYTH'S ACCOUNT OF 



most of the stone ; but wherever the original surface or the joints can be met 

 with, they are precisely as I have described ; fair white stone, and joints con- 

 scientiously cemented yet microscopically fine. 



This is a fact ; so is it also that the room, so remarkably approached, has seven 

 sides, on account of the peculiar double form of the ceiling, as shown in the 

 diagram. (See Plate XXVIII.) These sides too are not very far from equal, espe- 

 cially when we supply, as we are bound to do, on the rough unfinished floor 

 some fine lining blocks, similar to those of the walls. 



But there is still something wanting to measured symmetry ; and we notice in 

 the east wall of the room, the large, well- wrought, deep-reaching niche which is 

 without a parallel through the whole of the Great Pyramid. The mechanical effect 

 of that niche on a computation of the bulk of the room, is plainly equivalent to the 

 eastern wall being pushed outwards somewhat ; not to the full depth evidently 

 of the niche, but probably somewhere between twenty and thirty inches ; I tried 

 twenty-five in the computation and then found that, expressed in ten thousand 

 square inches, six of the walls each measure accurately three, and the seventh 

 measures five. 



Now we had been previously led to look on this room as a masonried represen- 

 tation of the week of seven days ; and here we have that realised with the addi- 

 tion, that six of them are ordinary days followed by, or founded on, one of greater 

 importance ; which is, in number, not only the definition precisely of the sacred 

 Hebrew week of Genesis and Sinai, but is entirely peculiar to that one, and 

 ancient arrangement of days. The full precision, however, of this result depends on 

 the somewhat arbitrary employment of twenty-five inches of increased length to 

 the room ; something of the sort should be done on account of the great niche- 

 space ; but what authority does the room afford for that particular length ? 



Look round about the room now (Plate XXVIII.) if you please, and if there be 

 any anomaly at all, other than the existence of the niche, it is, that so admirably 

 wrought an architectural decoration is not in the centre of its containing wall. 



Why it should not have been constructed in the centre, I have never heard the 

 remotest guess ; but measure the distance of its vertical axis from the same 

 feature of the room, and you will find it just this twenty-five inches, or the 

 sacred cubit, first of the Pyramid, subsequently of the Israelites, and now, by the 

 light of modern science, shown to be no accidental length, but the one ten- 

 millionth of the earth's radius of rotation. 



Such then is the standard under which this remarkable arrangement of the 

 chamber of seven was constructed ; and, from the manner of its construction, at 

 no other time than that of the original building of the Pyramid ; sealed up too 

 from that, or near that, time to all mankind, until the accident which was more 

 than an accident, and revealed this part of the interior of the Pyramid to 

 Caliph Almamoun only a few hundred years ago. 



