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.