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.