Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: off at c, leads up to the royal burial-chamber, r, situated almost in the centre of the structure. Below this is a third room, called the "Queen's Chamber," though there is no authority for the name. The chambers and corridors are interesting constructionally, for they show the methods adopted by these early engineers for bridging- over openings in order to resist a superincumbent weight. The central corridor is 28 feet high, with a ceiling formed by courses' of masonry which overhang one another successively until they meet at the top. In the case of the " King's Chamber," in which the royal sarcophagus was deposited, marvellous ingenuity was displayed in making the roof strong enough to prevent the weight overhead from crushing through. Five enormous stone slabs were fixed, as we see in the illustration, with a small chamber between each of them ; these were surmounted by a rudimentary arch, formed by two massive lintels tilted in such a way as to meet over the centre of the opening. How this colossal enter- Fio. 2. - Corbelling Prise was carried out in all its over King's Chamber. details continues to be an excellent subject for speculation. The limestone quarries, which provided the bulk of the stone, were situated at El Massarah, a distance of fifty miles from Ghizeh ; the red granite could not have been quarried nearer than Assouan, upon the banks of the Nile, 500 miles away. The blocks of stone could be readily floated down the stream upon rafts; thence it is probable thatthey were slowly moved into position by means of rollers, being gradually raised to the required height along an inclined plane or embankment constructed for this purpose. It is stated that 100,000 men were employed upon the Great Pyramid for a period of twenty years; so that the raising of such an emba...