Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 195, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 August 1911 — SOLVE MYSTERY OF THE PYRAMIDS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

SOLVE MYSTERY OF THE PYRAMIDS

IT slumbered for 37 centuries before the coming of Christ —the Great Pyramid of Cheops, or Khu- . fu. It still stands there, eight miles from Cairo, defying time, the elements and the vandals, all working together, barely able to stretch its skin. Egyptologists worked at it; Napoleon fought one of his splendid battles in its shadow. an American, Dow Covington, has brought out the latest word from its mysterious depths; he has almost solved its secret /Mr, Covington has cleared every* passage that can be found. He has made it possible for visitors to reach the mysterious subterranean chamber within its shaft, which goes as far down as the level of the Nile in 2170 B. C. Best of all, he has cleared the single remaining course just above the sands of the desert and revealed to the world that its outer sheath was of pure white limestone, which nobody i knew before, because the great mass of stone had been used as a common quarry for thousands of years. The limestone sheathing makes a mosque in Egypt today. When the tomb of Cheops was first reared it was as white as a marble mansion of our times. But it is not so now.

Few of us can realize what thirtyseven centuries before Christ really means. That is 5,611 years ago. The technical work of those' days was marvelous. The masonry is absolutely unrivaled —there is nothtng better in all the world today. Monuments and , palaces have come and have gone a hundred times since the great pyramid was built. They, have perished; it remains. For twenty years 100,000 men toiled at the stones. They built their great pile facing exactly north and south. They chose a base of nearly a seventh of a mile, 761 feet, to be exact. This was a plot covering nearly IS acres. There were 210 perfect courses of stone, almost invisibly joined, of Mokattem limestone blocks. At an angle of a little more than fifty-one degrees its four sides swept up, tapering to the pointed apex, 431 feet above the ground. In it were 85,000,000 cubic feet of stone, put up by people who. had no modern machinery. There are about 2,300,000 individual blocks. Treated for centuries as a public quarry, all its outer stones and facings have been taken to Cairo and elsewhere, chiefly for mosque construction. The antiquaries never knew about this outside sheath until Mr. Covington of America came there with permission from the British government to make his explorations. Mr. Covington began his work nine years' ago, making his camp in the shadow of the great pyramid. He started where the Caliph Mamoun left off in 818 A. D., nearly 1,100 years ago. It was Mamoun who forced the first passage into the stern depths of the monster of stone, but after he found it nothing. more was done for cen(turies. Whole generations came and went before anything was learned of the mystery. First of all the American searcher cleared away all the Then he started at the descending or entrance passage, just below its granite plugs, and found the mysterious chamber below the ground-burrowed out of the living rock beneath the mighty pile above —“The stones of darkness and the shadow of death.” What this chamber was for is not yet known. The passage leading to it may now be used 19 cautious visitors. It Is 350 feet long and through the natural rock slopes down not -half an inch out of plumb. When he got to the bottom of this chamber Mr. Covington realised that there was more to do. He found a well shaft, 192 feet long, piled up with twenty feet of debris. When this was cleared away there stinted a current of strong, fresh air. It swept down the entrance passage, up the well shaft, thence down the deeeendlng passage out by the forced passage made by Mr. Mamoun. Immediately the temperature dropped 2 degrees. When Mr. Covington cleared the debris from the lower end of the king's chamber south sir channel. 174 feet inng, he reduced the temperature again, c The ordinary man may but visit the great pyramid—or any of the others, for that matter. Unless he have authority from the British government,

which has Sir Gaston Maspero as its director general of antiques, no man is allowed to touch a single pebble, mudh less explore. But Mr. Covington did such good work at the beginning that he has been authorized to clear away the sixty-nine feet of debris which obstructs the upper and outer end of the channel which leads to the great chamber of the king—the great Cheops, or Khufu, himself. Then for the first time in history the interior of this wonder of the world will be free from all obstructions. Beneath the great King’s chamber, in the heart of the pyramid, is the queen’s chamber. Mr. Covington is now* at work trying to find the interior ends of the 300-foot air channels. The inner extremities of these were discovered by an Englishman, Weyman Dixon, in 1872. Masons today build no more beautifully than did those ancient men who toiled 5,600 years ago. They have left their own monument in the queen’s chamber, which, apparently, was never üßed. It is superbly finished and jointed; yet, oddly enough, the entrance to this superb tomb was covered and concealed. Possibly it was Intended for Martitefe, Khufu’s queen, but she survived him and married his brother Chephren, who built the second pyramid in the Threat group which stands today as a perpetual monument just outside Cairo. The great king’s chamber, 35 feet by 17 by 19, is wrought in polished granite. Just one hundred perfect blocks in five courses compose its walls. Nine granite slabs form its ceiling and the floor of the low granite chamber above. The second chamber’s ceiling forms the floor of a third chamber, and so on up to the fifth, which is the topmost, each one rising over the great one intended for the dead king. Like the queen’s chamber, this top one is roofed with an arch of heavy limestone slabs. On one tof those slabs there still stays in living paint Khufu’s quarry mark, or official seal —two birds and a snake, surmounted by a round dot Of the mysteries, he has found Mr. Covingston has just spoken, and espetially above the grand gallery, 155 fedt long and 28 feet high, by which the king’s chamber was reached. “I consider this the moßt mysterious part of this mighty miracle in stone/’ said be, “because if the pyramid were intended only as a tomb there was practically no use for this elaborate grand gallery, with its strange and remarkable features, except perhaps to temporarily accommodate the granite plugs which still close the lower end of the ascending passage, but which I find fit too tightly to have been Blld into position. At an angle of about twenty-six degrees eight minutes it dopes up for 155 feet, its height 28 feet, and its width above the ramps nearly seven feet Its great sides are clearly marked by seven overlapping layers of stone, while it is roofed by thirty-six slabs. Bordering the third overlapping layer is a finely finished narrow groove extending right round the gallery; it is but one of several remarkable and Inexplicable features which distinguish this part of the structure. • , "A twenty-inch ramp borders each side of the gallery, extending right up to the great step, which is yard high. Bach ramp contalngrjMtn-ty-eight rampholes, over nearlyptffa* which, for some strange and Y/t unknown reason, shallow holes Info been chiseled out, and a neat ck4eflttlng stone let In. “As most pyramidists are much perplexed by this feature and have advanced theories I myst venture mine. It is just possible that the places chiseled out originally contained inscriptions, which the king for some reason desired to obliterate. It became necessary then to remove—to chisel out — the disfigured parts caused by theobllteratlon and replace them by a closefitting let-in stone. “In 1905 I discovered on the twentysixth course of the south Hank a similar let-in stone, to the reverse side of which still adhered buff-colored cement It had doubless become detached from the face of a falling casing stoni. Clearly incised In the dressed surface was the fall tenth part of an 18-incb. diameter circle. It was the only known Inscribed stone ever found on the great pyramid. 1 would judge it had been let Into a south flank casing stone at a place from which another Inscription had been for some reason chiseled out”