INTERIOR OF THE GREAT EGYPTIAN PYRAMID.
After dining with Caviglia, dear A——, to continue my yarn, we started by moonlight for the Pyramid, in company with the Genius Loci, and duly provided with candles for exploration. I must premise that Caviglia, whose extraordinary discoveries you are doubtless well acquainted with, has just been set to work again by Colonel Vyse, Mr Sloane, and Colonel Campbell, our Consul-General at Cairo. He is at present attempting to make further discoveries in the Great Pyramid; and as soon as he gets a firman from the Pasha, intends to attack the others.
The shape of this Pyramid has been compared to “four equilateral triangles on a square basis, mutually inclining towards each other till they meet in a point.” Lincoln’s-Inn Fields, the area of which corresponds to its base, wholly filled up with an edifice higher by a third than St Paul’s, may give some idea of its dimensions.
The entrance is on the northern face of the Pyramid, on the sixteenth step, though you can ride up to it, such immense mounds of fallen stones have accumulated at the base. A long low passage, most beautifully cut and polished, runs downwards above 260 feet at an angle of twenty-seven degrees, to a large hall sixty feet long, directly under the centre of the Pyramid, cut out of rock, and never, it would appear, finished. This was discovered by Caviglia; the passage before this time was supposed to end about half way down, being blocked up with stones at the point where another passage meets it, running upwards at the same angle of 27, and by which you might mount in a direct line to the grand gallery, and from that to the king’s chamber, where stands the sarcophagus, nearly in the centre of the pile, were it not for three or four blocks of granite that have been slid down from above, in order to stop it up.
By climbing through a passage, formed, as it is supposed, by the Caliph Mamoun, you wind round these blocks of granite into the passage, so that, with the exception of ten or twelve feet, you do in fact follow the original line of ascent. We descended by it. Close to the opening of this passage on the grand gallery is the mouth of a well about 200 feet deep, by which we ascended from the neighbourhood of the great lower hall. Two or three persons had descended it before Caviglia’s time, but he cleared it out to the full depth that his predecessors had reached, and believing it went still deeper, hearing a hollow sound as he stamped on the bottom, he attempted to excavate there, but was obliged to desist on account of the excessive heat, which neither he nor the Arabs could stand.
Think what his delight must have been, when in the course of clearing the passage which I mentioned to you leads directly from the great lower hall, smelling a strong smell of sulphur; and remembering he had burnt some in the well to purify the air, he dug in that direction, and found a passage leading right into the bottom of the well, where the ropes, pick-axes, &c., &c., were lying that he had left there in despair, on abandoning the idea of further excavation in that direction as hopeless.
Up this well, as I said, we climbed, holding a rope, and fixing our feet in holes cut in the stone; the upper part of the ascent was very difficult, and bats in numbers came tumbling down on us; but at last we landed safely in the grand gallery, a noble nondescript of an apartment, very lofty, narrowing towards the roof, and most beautifully chiselled; it ends towards the south in a staircase, if I may so term an inclined plane, with notches cut in the surface for the feet to hold by; the ascent is perilous, the stone being as polished and slippery as glass; before ascending, however, we proceeded by another beautifully worked passage, cut directly under the staircase to a handsome room called the queen’s chamber. Returning to the gallery, we mounted the inclined plane to the king’s chamber, directly over the queen’s. The passage to leading to it was defended by a portcullis now destroyed, but you see the grooves it fell into. His majesty’s chamber is a noble apartment, cased with enormous slabs of granite, twenty feet high; nine similar ones (seven large and two half-sized) form the ceiling.
At the west end stands the sarcophagus, which rings, when struck, like a bell. From the north and south sides respectively of this room branch two small oblong-square passages, like air-holes, cut through the granite slabs, and slanting upwards—the first for eighty feet in a zigzag direction, the other for one hundred and twenty.
It is Caviglia’s present object to discover whither these lead. Being unable to pierce the granite, he has begun cutting sideways into the limestone at the point where the granite casing of the chamber ends has reached the northern passage at the point where it is continued through the limestone, and is cutting a large one below it, so that the former runs like a groove in the roof of the latter, and he has only to follow it as a guide, and cut away till he readies the denouement. “Now,” says Caviglia, “I will show you how I hope to find out where the southern passage leads to.”
Returning to the landing-place at the top of the grand staircase, we mounted a ricketty ladder to the narrow passage that leads to Davison’s chamber, so named after the English consul at Algiers, who discovered it seventy years ago; it is directly above the king’s chamber, the ceiling of the one forming, it would appear, the floor of the other. The ceiling of Davison’s chamber consists of eight stones, beautifully worked; and this ceiling, which is so low that you can only sit cross-legged under it, Caviglia believes to be the floor of another large room above it, which he is now trying to discover. To this room he concludes the little passage leads that branches from the south side of the king’s chamber. He has accordingly dug down the calcareous stone at the farther end of Davison’s chamber, in hopes of meeting it; once found, it will probably lead him to the place he is in quest of.—Lord Lindsay’s Letters from the East.
John Philpot Curran.—Mr Curran happening to cross-examine one of those persons known in Ireland by the significant description of half-gentlemen, found it necessary to ask a question as to his knowledge of the Irish tongue, which, though perfectly familiar to him, the witness affected not to understand, whilst he at the same time spoke extremely bad English. “I see, sir, how it is: you are more ashamed of knowing your own language than of not knowing any other.”
A barrister entered the hall with his wig very much awry, and of which not at all apprised, he was obliged to endure from almost every observer some remark on its appearance, till at last, addressing himself to Mr Curran, he asked him, “Do you see any thing ridiculous in this wig?” The answer instantly was, “Nothing but the head.”
Bills of indictment had been sent up to a grand jury, in the finding of which Mr Curran was interested. After delay and much hesitation, one of the grand jurors came into court to explain to the judge the grounds and reasons why it was ignored. Mr Curran, very much vexed by the stupidity of this person, said “You, sir, can have no objection to write upon the back of the bill ignoramus, for self and fellow-jurors; it will then be a true bill.”
Mr Hoare’s countenance was grave and solemn, with an expression like one of those statues of the Brutus head. He seldom smiled; and if he smiled, he smiled in such a sort as seemed to have rebuked the spirit that could smile at all. Mr Curran once observing a beam of joy to enliven his face, remarked, “Whenever I see smiles on Hoare’s countenance, I think they are like tin clasps on an oaken coffin.”
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