The Storehouses of the King

ecame rulers of the east and west, the Caliph Al Mamoun, in the year A.D. 820, came from Bagdad to El Fostat, an earlier Cairo, and determined to enter the largest Pyramid and examine its co

trated no less than one hundred feet in depth from the entrance. By that time, they were becoming thoroughly exhausted, and began to despair of the hard and hitherto fruitless labour, when one day they

y dark and dreadful to look at, and difficult to pass. It was the inclined and descending entrance-passage of the Pyramid, where the

pull out the fragments there, was entirely out of the question; so the workmen broke through the smaller ordinary masonry, and thus up again by a huge chasm-still visible, and used by visitors into the interior-to the ascending passage, at a point past the terrific hardness of its lower granite obstruction. They found up there beyond the portcullis the passage-way still blocked, but the filling material at that part was only limestone; so, making themselves a very great hole in the masonry along the western side, they there wielded their tools on the long blocks which presented themselves to their view. But as fast as they broke up and pulled out the pieces of one of the blocks in thi

rty-one in breadth. They suddenly emerge into a long high gallery, all black as night and in death-like silence; still ascending, they see another low passage. On their right hand is the dark

ending at an angle of 26°, these men had to push their dangerous and slippery way for about a hundred feet still further; then an obstructing three-foot step to climb over;

mber, about thirty-four feet long, seventeen broad, and nineteen high, of polished red granite throughout, in blocks squared and put

found absolutely nothing that he could make any use of, or saw the smallest value in. He returned to El Fostat greatly disappointed, and the Grand Gallery, the King's Chambe

in that chamber by the inspired builder Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham the Hebrew, the friend of God; the Pyramid being a gigantic granary holding corn, and this the measure by which he ascertained the quantity stored in it. The passages in the walls, called air-channels by Egyptologists, were apertures th

quare and level bottom of which rests an antique rude sarcophagus of very gigantic proportions. But deep as is the pit containing it, it is surrounded by a grand rectangular trench which goes down deeper still, cut clearly in solid limestone rock the whole of the way down; and to such a depth does it reach at last as to descend below the level of the adjacent waters of the Nile at inundation time. T

e names of Chemmis, Cheops, Xufu, Suphis, Philition the Shepherd, &c. All these appellations belong to no other person t

ried away by the children of Israel when they took their d

een stored; for any person entering such places, though emptied of their contents, but left unswept, would get covered with a grey powder fallen

ed by Dr. Grant, and had not denied it; but so strongly was he imbued with the mere tombic idea of the Egyptians, that he held, as he lay there, with the notion that he was lying down in a royal coffin; and when he, Dr. --, rose up from that open granite chest and found himself filthy, horrible, odious, with fine grey dust begr

he Pyramids of Egypt. It is as follows:-"For a day or two after the chamber had been opened those who remained in it became blackened as if by

o was said to contain ligneous particles. When analysed in England it was supposed to consist of the exuvi? of insects; but as the deposition was equally diffused over the floor, and extremely like the substance found on the 25th instant (1837) at the Second Pyramid, it was most probably composed of particles of decayed stone. If it had be

s fitted with cement and polished, making these edifices appear like natural rocks. Bruce, the great traveller, an

of taking out the grain carried on by means of long shafts bored in the adjacent ground to a depth reaching the foundation of the Pyramid, where there were openings from which the contents could be tapp

y in many places forced, led to a lofty chamber, in the roof of which wood had been employed. Various forced passages wound around this chamber, and conducted to openings, or windows, which looked down into it from a considerable height.[26] These passages were much encumbered with