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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
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