Still, the three seem, all of them, to deserve description, and to
challenge a place in "the story of Egypt," which has never yet been told
without some account of the marvels of each of them. The smallest of the
three was a square of three hundred and fifty-four feet each way, and
had a height of two hundred and eighteen feet. It covered an area of two
acres, three roods, and twenty-one poles, or about that of an ordinary
London square. The cubic contents amounted to above nine million feet of
solid masonry, and are calculated to have weighed 702,460 tons. The
height was not very impressive. Two hundred and twenty feet is an
altitude attained by the towers of many churches, and the "Pyramid of
the Sun" at Teotihuacan did not fall much short of it; but the mass was
immense, the masonry was excellent, and the ingenuity shown in the
construction was great. Sunk in the rock from which the pyramid rose,
was a series of sepulchral chambers. One, the largest, almost directly
under the apex of the pyramid, was empty. In another, which had an
arched roof, constructed in the most careful and elaborate way, was
found the sarcophagus of the king, Men-kau-ra, to whom tradition
assigned the building, formed of a single mass of blue-black basalt,
exquisitely polished and beautifully carved, externally eight feet long,
three feet high, and three feet broad, internally six feet by two. In
the sarcophagus was the wooden coffin of the monarch, and on the lid of
the coffin was his name. The chambers were connected by two long
passages with the open air; and another passage had, apparently, been
used for the same purpose before the pyramid attained its ultimate size.
The tomb-chamber, though carved in the rock, had been paved and lined
with slabs of solid stone, which were fastened to the native rock by
iron cramps. The weight of the sarcophagus which it contained, now
unhappily lost, was three tons.
[Illustration: SECTION OF THE THIRD PYRAMID, SHOWING PASSAGES.]
[Illustration: TOMB-CHAMBER OF THE THIRD PYRAMID.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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