observations, relating to the life of that monarch only, as
affording the most satisfactory explanation yet advanced of the
mysterious circumstance that the building was closed up after his death.
Supposing the part of the edifice (fifty layers in all), which includes
the ascending and descending passages, to have been erected during his
lifetime, it may be that some reverential or superstitious feeling
caused his successors, or the priesthood, to regard the building as
sacred after his death--to be closed up therefore and completed as a
perfect pyramid, polished _ad unguem_ from its pointed summit to the
lines along which the four faces met the smooth pavement round its base.
We might thus explain why each monarch required his own astrological
observatory afterwards to become his tomb. Be this as it may, it is
certain that the pyramids were constructed for astronomical
observations; and it would, I conceive, be utterly unreasonable to
imagine that the costly interior fittings and arrangements, "not
inferior, in respect of curiosity of art or richness of materials, to
the most sumptuous and magnificent buildings," were intended to subserve
no other purpose but to be memorials; and that, too, not until, in the
course of thousands of years, the whole mass of the pyramid had begun to
lose the exactness of its original figure.

R. A. PROCTOR.

FOOTNOTES:

[43] It seems to me not improbable that the level was determined by
simply flooding (though to a very small depth only, of course) the
entire area to be levelled--not only the pavement level, but higher
levels as the pyramid was raised layer by layer. By completing the
outside of each layer first, an enclosed space capable of receiving the
water would be formed (the flooding being required once only for each
layer), and when the level had been taken the water could be allowed to
run off by the interior passages to the well which Piazzi Smyth
considers to be symbolical of the bottomless pit.

[44] The irregular descending passage long known as the well, which
communicates between the ascending passage and the underground chamber,
enables us to ascertain how high the rock rises into the pyramid at this
particular part of the base. We thus learn that the rock rises in this
place, at any rate, thirty or forty feet above the basal plane.

[45] There is a statement perfectly startling in its inaccuracy, in a
chapter of Blake's "Astronomical Myths," derived from Mr. Halibu