Position 21 - The Second Pyramid With Its Crown Of Original Casing Masonry, Southwest From The Summit Of The Great Pyramid

We stand looking southwestward toward the heart of Africa, with Cairo almost behind us and Memphis on our left. Before us looms the second pyramid, completely hiding the third and smallest, which lies behind it. This is probably not the best point of view from which to be impressed with its size, and yet when you remember that yonder cap of casing masonry which still crowns it, extends for 150 feet down its sides, this may serve as a scale by which to measure the rest; but lifted as we are upon the shoulders of the great pyramid, we are taking an unfair advantage in thus looking down upon its slightly smaller neighbor. But how splendidly it rises against that background of billowy desert, which stretches away southward.

Here, and a little to the east (left) of our present range of vision, is the northern extremity of a line of pyramids distributed in groups extending some sixty miles in length, from the pyramid of Illahun in the south, to the ruinous group of Abu Roâsh just behind us here on the north of the Gizeh group. This sixty-mile line of pyramids represents a line of Pharaohs, who reigned over a thousand years. We shall view the southern end of this line later on, and stand as it were, at the other end of that thousand years (Position 34); for, speaking roughly, it begins at the north, proceeds southward and ends at the southern termination of the line.

Peeping out from behind the second pyramid you see one of those small ones, which stand at the base of the third pyramid (see Map 5). Further east (left), but nearer to us, you observe three low sand-covered walls, two extending eastward, and one at right angles to these.

The nearer of the two parallel walls is part of the enclosure wall surrounding the second pyramid; that at right angles to it, is part of a similar wall enclosing the third pyramid; while the further of the two parallel walls is really not a wall at all, but the upper end of the causeway leading from the plain to the desert plateau and the third pyramid, up which the material for it was transported, and by means of which, after the king's death, access was gained to the temple of the pyramid, where his mortuary ritual was regularly carried on by an endowed priesthood.

Do you remember the mastaba tombs which we saw down yonder near the base of this pyramid on which we stand? Do you recollect that we called attention to the fact that these mastaba tombs have on the east side a chapel chamber where the deceased lived, ate, drank and was clothed?

Follow that causeway out there (what we called the further parallel wall) westward (to the right), and as your eye approaches the second pyramid, you notice just on this side of the tiny pyramid, a small heap of ruins. Those ruins are all that remains of the chapel belonging to the third pyramid, now just out of range behind the second. Like the chapel of the mastaba, it is on the east side of the pyramid to which it belongs, but as the king naturally demands a more pretentious chapel than that of his nobles, it becomes a temple, detached from the pyramid.

You will see this still more clearly if you look at the ruins here at the extreme left, more at our feet, over this standing native's head. These are the remains of the temple of the second pyramid, and it stands, as you see, on the east front of the pyramid (see Map 5). There in that desolate sand-covered ruin, once a splendid sanctuary, an endowed priesthood carried on the ritual and worship of the dead Khafre, who lay in the pyramid; and there from the foundations established by the king for the purpose, he daily received the offerings of food and drink, which were to maintain him in the hereafter. Two thousand years after these kings of the Old Kingdom have passed away, we still find priests of their cult, though the fortunes of their temples had by that time fallen very low.

The pyramid before us lacked nine feet of being as high as that one on which we stand; it was 472 feet high, but as it has lost but a trifle at its summit, while the first pyramid has lost thirty feet, and as it also stands upon higher ground, we look up to its peak even from the top of the great pyramid. The length of each side is 706 feet, yet despite its vast mass, when Belzoni opened it on March 2nd, 1818, he found that it had been robbed in antiquity and the body had disappeared.

The futility of all this enormous expense of human labor and of human skill in the vain attempt to preserve the body and thus secure immortality for the spirit, is as depressing as that illimitable sweep of barren desert, that stretches away from the pyramid at our feet till it is lost on the distant horizon. It forms a fitting background for the silent pyramid in which both the body and the hope of Khafre were entombed.

We must now turn to the right and from the same point where we now stand look down the southwest corner of this pyramid to the summit of which we have climbed. On Map 5 the red lines numbered 22 show what our field of vision will be.