Chapter 4 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]

This is the tomb of which Herodotus speaks as the resting-place of the builder of the Great Pyramid, to whom he gives the names of Chemmis, Cheops, Xufu, Suphis, Philition the Shepherd, &c. All these appellations belong to no other person than Zaphnath-paaneah, the Viceroy of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, the great-grandson of Abraham the Hebrew, the friend of God!

The sarcophagus is empty, for the bones of Joseph were carried away by the children of Israel when they took their departure from Egypt under the leadership of Moses and Aaron.

Visitors who enter the Pyramid get covered with a fine grey dust or powder similar to that found in large rooms or buildings wherein grain has been stored; for any person entering such places, though emptied of their contents, but left unswept, would get covered with a grey powder fallen from corn, or rice, or wheat, &c., which in every respect resembles this fine grey dust. In confirmation of this the following is an instance:-

"Last month (1877) an American newspaper, recounting a recent visit to the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, mentions how the clergyman of the party, the Rev. Dr. --, insisted on laying himself down full length inside the coffer. He had heard the inspiration, and scientific metrological theory of the Great Pyramid duly related 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 begriming his hair and transfusing his clothes, he had a great deal of trouble about it; for not until he had got right away from Egypt, and obtained the help of the steward's assistant on board ship to give the clothes an extra beating over the waves of the rolling sea, was the last of the penetrating powdery stuff got rid of."[25]

Colonel Howard Vyse also found a substance of this description when he entered the Pyramids, of which he gave a minute account in his work on the 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 a London fog. As this effect gradually disappeared, I conceive it to have been occasioned by the blasting and by the sudden admission of the air.

"Upon first entering the apartment, a black sediment was found, of the consistence of a hoar-frost, equally distributed over the floor, so that footsteps could be distinctly seen impressed on it, and it had accumulated to some depth in the interstices of the blocks. Some of this sediment which was sent to the French establishment near Cairo 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 been the remains of rotten wood, or of a quantity of insects that had penetrated through the masonry, it would scarcely have been so equally distributed; and if caused by the latter, it is difficult to imagine why some of them should not have been found alive when the place was opened evidently for the first time since the Pyramid was built."

Previous to the visitation of the seven years' famine, these granaries were built and stored, and the casing-stones fitted with cement and polished, making these edifices appear like natural rocks. Bruce, the great traveller, and other old travellers of those days, mistook them for such (natural rocks) and paid no attention to them whatever.

When the time arrived that the Storehouses of the King were required to be tapped, and food distributed to the famine-stricken people, the exterior of these buildings was left entire, and the operation 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 tapped. These could be opened and shut at pleasure, as Joseph ordered that all the granaries should be closed with the exception of one, where he hoped to see his brothers when they came to buy corn in Egypt.

Colonel Howard Vyse gives a description of one of these entrances, thus:-"The Pyramid of Saccara. This Pyramid was built in steps, or degrees, and was entered from a sort of well, or shaft, made in the sand on the northern side. The passage, which was long and winding, and apparently 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 rubbish, pieces of alabaster, and decayed wood; and in one place there was an accumulation of large blocks of polished granite, raised up by small fragments of stone sufficiently high to admit of a man's crawling beneath them. For what purpose they were so placed we did not find out."