CHAPTER IV.
THE PYRAMIDS AS GRANARIES.
The land of Shinar, with its desolate tower, the marvellous prototype of the Great Pyramid of Jeezeh, passed from one conqueror to another; and when the descendants of the Prophet Mohammed became 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 contents, for he believed from the reports brought to him that it contained untold treasures. He ordered his Mohammedan workmen to begin at the middle of the northern side of the Great Pyramid. These men worked on unceasingly by night and by day. Weeks and months were consumed in these toilsome exertions; so persevering, however, were they, that, though progressing slowly, they at length penetrated 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 heard a great stone fall evidently in some hollow space within not more than a few feet on one side of them. In the fall of that particular stone there seems to have been somewhat more than an accident.
They instantly pushed on in the direction of the strange noise. Breaking through a wall surface, they burst into the hollow way, very dark and dreadful to look at, and difficult to pass. It was the inclined and descending entrance-passage of the Pyramid, where the Romans and others passed up and down in their occasional visits to the subterranean chamber and its unfinished, unquarried-out floor.
A large angular-fitting stone, that had been for ages, with its lower flat side, a smooth and polished portion of the ceiling of the inclined and narrow entrance-passage, quite undistinguishable from any other part of the whole of its line, had now dropped on to the floor before their eyes, and revealed that there was just behind it the end of another passage, clearly ascending therefrom towards the south. That ascending passage itself was still closed a little further up by a portcullis or stopper, formed by a series of huge granite plugs, of square wedge-like shape, dropped or slid down, and then jammed in immovably from above. To break this in pieces within the confined space, and 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 this ascending passage, other blocks, also of such a size as to completely fill it, slid down from above, and where there should have been free passage there was still an obstruction of solid stone. The men despair; but the Caliph, being present, insists that, whatever the number of stone plugs still to come down from the mysterious reservoir, his men shall hammer and hammer them, one after the other, and bit by bit, to little pieces, at the only opening where they can get at them, until they at last come to the end. So the work goes on, till at length the ascending passage, beginning just above the granite portcullis, leading thence upward and to the south, becomes free from obstruction.
On they rush, up one hundred and ten feet of the steep incline, crouching hands and knees and chin together, through a passage of polished white limestone, forty-seven inches in height and forty-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, ominous-looking mouth of a deep well, in which not even at a depth of more than 140 feet is the water reached; while onwards and above them is a continuation of the gallery leading them on.
The way was narrow, not more than six feet broad anywhere, and contracted to three feet at the floor, but twenty feet high, and of polished marble-like stone throughout. Ascending 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; next a low doorway; then a hanging portcullis to pass, almost to creep under; and then another low doorway, with awful blocks of red granite on either side, above, and below.
After this they leaped without further obstruction at once into the grand chamber, a right noble apartment now called the King’s Chamber, about thirty-four feet long, seventeen broad, and nineteen high, of polished red granite throughout, in blocks squared and put together with exquisite skill. In this apartment they found—nothing, except an empty stone chest or box or coffer without a lid![[22]]
The Caliph Al Mamoun was amazed, for he had arrived at the very furthest part of the interior of the Great Pyramid he had so long desired to take possession of, and had now 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 Chamber, and the stone coffer without a lid were troubled by him no more; for after this he left Egypt and returned to his imperial residence in Bagdad, where he died in A.D. 842.
The entrance into the Great Pyramid in use in our time is the one thus made by this prince. The granite chest or coffer without a lid, found in the King’s Chamber above-mentioned, was not a sarcophagus, or a coffin, but simply a corn measure, and nothing else, which holds about four English quarters. It was placed 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 through which the corn was thrown from without into the chamber, and thence into the vast receptacles below. The grain was brought from the fields to the apertures up the steps, before the casing-stones were fitted to the whole edifice, which, being afterwards polished, kept the contents secure from moth and mildew.
When Joseph died “his body was embalmed and afterwards laid in the ground near the banks of the Nile.”[[23]] The locality that exactly answers this place of sepulture has been discovered in modern times. “The structure found there is situated about a thousand feet south-east of the Pyramid building, and still to be seen, descended into, and measured, is a colossally large and deep burial pit, on the square 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. Then, as the waters of that river necessarily percolate the hygroscopic rock of the hill up to their own level, the lower depths of the trench are filled with Nile water, and the grand old sarcophagus of the interior pit does then rest in a manner on an island surrounded by the waters of the Nile; and it is the only known tomb on the Jeezeh hill which is gifted with that peculiarity or privilege.”[[24]]