The pyramid of Cheops, known as the Great Pyramid, was twenty years in building, and it is said by Herodotus to have required the labor of a hundred thousand men during that time. Cheops stopped all other works connected with religious rites until the pyramid was completed. To facilitate the transportation of stone from the Tourah quarries, a causeway was built three thousand feet long, sixty feet wide, and fifty feet high, which is said to have required ten years for its completion. A railway engineer of the present day would have finished this causeway in a month, provided he could have the unlimited supply of laborers possessed by the Egyptian kings. The Great Pyramid covers an area of between twelve and thirteen acres; the side of its square measures seven hundred and forty-six feet, and its height is four hundred and fifty feet. It was originally seven hundred and sixty feet square and four hundred and eighty feet high; its outer portions have been removed to furnish stone for building purposes in Cairo. Originally, it was a perfect pyramid; the builders began at the top and filled in, with small stone and cement, the angles formed by the recession of each layer beyond the one below it. Each side was thus left with an even surface sloping at an angle of 51° 50´. The outer casing being removed has left the courses of stone in the form of steps nearly four feet high, so that the ascent is not an easy one. There are always plenty of Arabs hanging around the pyramid ready to assist a traveller who wishes to ascend to the summit. By pulling and pushing him over the steps, they get him up at a reasonably rapid rate; but the exercise is of such a nature, that it frequently leaves him feeling very much as if he had been passed through a patent clothes wringer. The pyramid contains about eighty-two millions of cubic feet of masonry, and the total weight of the stone used in its construction is estimated at more than six million tons. The entrance is on the north face, fifty feet above the base, and about twenty-four feet from the central line. The passage-way is low and narrow, and extends, in a downward slope of twenty-six degrees, three hundred and twenty feet to the sepulchral chamber. The chamber is forty-six feet long, twenty-seven feet wide, and eleven feet high. There is a branch passage-way leading from the main one, which terminates in a smaller room, called the Queen’s Chamber; it is supposed that this room was intended for the resting-place of the queen’s body, but it contains no sarcophagus. [Sidenote: THE KING’S CHAMBER.]