He went first to Gizeh, and wandered about the three pyramids, studying
and observing.
From the sands of the Egyptian desert, which are cornelian in hue and
strewn with colored pebbles much like fragments of ancient pottery, the
pyramids rise as masses of old ivory stone suffused with a certain golden
rust; the description is laboured, but the effect is not to be given in a
word. Belzoni, trudging the sand, watched the late afternoon light bring
out the grey. The second great pyramid, the pyramid of Chephren, had
taken his eye, and round it and about he went, now gazing up to the cap
of reddish surfacing still in place about the peak, now pausing to study
the huge confusion of sand and wreckage washed up about the base like a
wave of shattered stone. Was there an opening, and if so, where? Or was
the pyramid a solid hill of stone as the Egyptians had told Herodotus
twenty-five hundred years before? The French scholars attached to
Napoleon’s expedition had sought an entrance in vain, and the Europeans
resident in Cairo were meditating a scheme of collecting 20,000 pounds
“at various European courts,” and “forcing their way into the centre of
this pyramid by explosions.”
“It seems little short of madness,” wrote Belzoni, “to renew the
enterprise.” The giant had now grown a fine black beard, and taken to
wearing Eastern dress, huge white turban and all. It was the proper thing
to do then when travelling in the East.
The entrance to the Great Pyramid being on the north, Belzoni studied
with particular care the northern face of the second pyramid, and
presently discovered there “three marks” which seemed to offer a clue.
Just under the centre of the north face of the pyramid, the bordering
wave of débris was high, as if it might possibly lie piled atop some
entrance way; the accumulation of stone at the mound seemed less compact
than the mass to either side, and the débris had apparently gathered
since the removal of the surfacing. There was the place, there would he
begin.
Somewhat to his surprise, he got his permission to dig quite easily, the
authorities merely insisting that he must not disturb “ploughed ground.”
The capital on which he hoped to accomplish his undertaking consisted of
a scant two hundred pounds, some of it a gift from Burckhardt, some of it
a profit from the sale of “antiquities.”
Early in February, 1818, the adventurer left Cairo quietly, and took up
his quarters in a tent by the second pyramid. Alone in his tent he sits,
this huge bearded man who has lived so fantastic a life; it is night,
and he smokes his long Turkish pipe, and watches the giant Egyptian moon
cast the pointed shadow of his pyramid upon sands traced with the paths
of naked feet. That monastery in Rome, the bells of other convents heard
over the wall as one walked the garden in the cool of the afternoon, the
rumble and galopade of a cardinal’s coach over the stones,—how far away
and old it all is in that still splendour of the Egyptian night!
At the pyramid all begins well, eighty natives have been secured, and
Belzoni has put forty to clearing the ground between the temple and
the pyramid, and forty more to clearing the débris at the rise by the
northern rim. The plates which accompany his text show the workmen to
have worn the short, rolled white drawers and turbans of this earlier
day, a costume far more picturesque than the long-skirted nightgown
affair and red felt “fez” of modern Egypt. A nimble folk these brown
Egyptians; they scramble about the pyramids today with the agility of
boys in an easy tree; even so they must have scrambled and chattered for
Belzoni. He paid them sixpence English a day, and hired boys and girls to
carry away the earth.
The giant sagely explained to his corps that it would be to their
advantage to find the entrance to the pyramid, for they would then have
another marvel to show to visitors, and thus get more bakshish[3] than
ever. The natives began with a will, but for several days their labors
promised no indication of success. It was particularly difficult work.
The fringe of wreckage had become solidly jammed, and the only tools to
be had were spades meant for the cutting of soft ground. There were times
when it seemed as if the workmen could scarcely proceed. At the end of a
fortnight’s digging, the party working on the ground between the temple
and the pyramid had cut through some forty feet of rubbish to a broad
pavement which seemed to encircle the pyramid; but the workmen at the
north side had uncovered only deeper and deeper layers of débris.
After some sixteen days of this, the workmen began to weary of the
task. “The Arabs,” said Belzoni, “continued, but with less zeal. Still
I observed that the stones on that spot were not so consolidated as
those on the sides of them, and I determined to proceed till I should be
persuaded that I was wrong in my conjecture.”
On the morning of February 18th, an overseer of the workmen came across
the sand dunes with promising news. A workman of the northern party had
perceived “a small chink” between two stones of the newly uncovered lower
side of the pyramid. Belzoni returned with the messenger, and found the
workers gathered in a talkative group awaiting his coming. Yes, there was
a small open slit between two of the great stones, into which the giant
was able “to thrust a palm stick to the length of two yards.” The workmen
took heart; their night of foolish labour for this incomprehensible
European infidel was seemingly ending in a dawn.
The loose stone, torn from its place, revealed a mystery,—a passage
some three feet wide choked with smaller stones and sand. Belzoni, in
his turban and loose white eastern dress, peered within, while his
half naked, dusky workers pushed and peeped and whispered behind that
Titan back. Was the mystery of the ages about to be unveiled? Would
they presently behold the legendary spirit of the pyramid—an old man
with a censer? This attendant guardian was still to be seen at sundown,
making the tour of his pyramid at about half way up the sides,—a solemn,
priestly figure who swung his censer as he walked. Trickles of sand
fell noiselessly from the roof of the opening; they heard the drop of
little stones; about them the quiet of the desert seemed to have become
intensified.
On being excavated, this passage proved to be wider within, and after
five days of clearing, the excavators arrived at an open tunnel leading
inward.
“Having made it wide enough,” said Belzoni, “I took a candle in my hand,
and looking in, perceived a spacious cavity ... bending its course to the
centre. It is evidently a forced passage executed by a powerful hand, and
appears intended to find a way to the centre of the pyramid.”
It was less a passage he had discovered than a wound. In ancient times
some ruler of the land had attempted to force the pyramid, but the deed
and the man had perished from the memory of the world, and the pyramid
itself had hidden the deep wound within its side. To make the entrance,
huge stones of the outer casing had been cut and sawed; then a ragged
tunnel had been pierced directly into the heart of the masonry. The task
had certainly taken toll of many lives. It was an awesome place, and
exceedingly dangerous. Huge stones, which the piercing of the tunnel had
left hanging by a thread, fell down, and every time that Belzoni crawled
down its length of a hundred feet, he never knew but what a cry and a
muffled crash might announce his living entombment in the dark of the
edifice.
Europeans from Cairo now got wind of the giant’s enterprise, and came
riding over the sands to see Belzoni at his task. The discovery of the
forced passage seems to have impressed them as an interesting failure, an
attitude which struck at the giant’s dignity and pride. He paused to mull
things over in his mind, and gave the workmen a special holiday.
The false passage ended in a pocket of fallen stone. He would abandon
his exploration of it, and continue his search for the real entrance.
Staff in hand, the huge figure, now resumes its trudge about the pyramid.
The workmen have gone, the wind over the desert lifts the dust out of the
hollows of the dunes, and brings no human sound; sand and ruin prevail.
The adventurer wanders over the waste to the great pyramid.
It was then open, and somewhere in the hot, repellent heart of it, rank
with the sour-foul odour of multitudes upon multitudes of bats, a typical
European adventurer was working simply because the pyramids were his
hobby. The name of this enthusiast was Caviglia, and he was the Italian
master of a Mediterranean trading vessel flying the British flag. The
good sailor had little education, and needed little, for his work was
primarily a matter of removing rubbish, and discovering what lay beneath.
In later years Colonel Howard Vyse had dealings with him, and found him
temperamental. Captain Caviglia, dear excitable Latin, rushed out of his
pyramid one morning and hurled on the Colonel’s breakfast table a subsidy
of forty pounds done up in an old sock. It appears that he considered the
sum quite unworthy of his efforts. The Colonel, however, was equal to
the occasion, and after taking out the money, returned the sock with his
“best compliments.” Such was the dawn of archæology!
Belzoni returned from his visit to his neighbour and countryman with a
new notion in his head. Prompted by certain indications, he had been
digging away the rubbish gathered before the centre of the northern face
of the second pyramid, whilst the entrance into the Great Pyramid was
not in line with the centre of that edifice, but some thirty feet to the
east of centre, for the tomb chamber lay in the centre, and the passage
entered at the chamber’s eastern end. He would abandon his excavation at
the forced passage, and begin again thirty feet to the east.
He went to the spot, and saw, or thought he saw, that the coating of
rubbish was there not so thickly piled. Moreover, it appeared sunken as
if an entrance below it might have fallen in. “This gave me no little
delight,” wrote the giant later, “and hope returned to cherish my
pyramidical brains.”
Again work began merrily, for the natives had grown to appreciate the
giant’s sixpence a day. But they thought their employer quite mad, and
Belzoni heard them whispering it to each other. “_Magnoon_,” they said as
he passed, and again “_magnoon_,”—the madman! More days of sunlight and
scurrying and digging of a tribe of black-brown _fellahin_. On February
28th, a world of excitement and heart-quickening anticipation; something
which looks like an entrance has been reached, for now appears a large
granite stone set into the pyramid at the same angle as the passage into
the Great Pyramid. The shovels flew that day. On the day following, they
have uncovered three great blocks of granite, one on each side and one on
top, all “lying in an inclined direction towards the centre.”
It was the entrance at last. By the second of March, the débris in front
of the three stones having been cleared away, the long-sought opening was
seen. It proved to be a passage, four feet high and three feet six inches
wide, which descended at a steep incline into the pyramid. Its granite
walls were undisturbed, but the passage itself was full of wreckage which
had slid down the incline and piled up to form a barrier.
Provided with torches and candles, Belzoni and a few workmen now
followed the passage for a hundred and four feet down into the dark.
Whither was it leading them? The giant bulk of Belzoni nearly filled up
the passage, as he came crouching almost double and holding a dripping
candle light. Suddenly, to their great dismay, the passage came to a
blind end at three solid granite walls.
Discouragement fell upon them as heavy as a pyramid. “At first sight,”
said Belzoni, “it seemed a fixed block of stone which stared me in the
face and said _ne plus ultra_, putting an end to all my projects as I
thought.” Suddenly, a discovery, a catch of the breath; the stone at the
end of the passage is not fixed solidly in place; it is a portcullis
which can be raised; the barrier stone is already eight inches above the
true floor, and rests on surface rubbish. There followed a hurrying back
and forth through the passage, a coming of workmen with levers, and a
time of hard work in the tiny cubicle of the passageway. The portcullis
stone was one foot three inches thick, and rose slowly because the
low ceiling permitted only a little play of the levers. At the outer
entrance, the workmen had gathered in a chattering and excited crowd;
they questioned those who came and went—what of wonders within, and how
vast was the treasure?
When the aperture had grown wide enough for a man to pass through, a
native squirmed under carrying a candle, and “returned saying that the
place within was very fine.” Belzoni, poor Titan, had to wait.
It had chanced that on the day before a fellow countryman of Belzoni’s,
the Chevalier Frediani, had come to visit Gizeh; he had proved a pleasant
guest, and the giant had invited him to remain for the opening of the
pyramid. This second Italian now joined the little group lifting the
portcullis. It was now high enough for Belzoni to crawl under, and he did
so, followed by the Chevalier.
Over a thousand years, perhaps more, had passed since the tunnels into
which they crawled had echoed to the sound of human voices. Belzoni led
the way, carrying a light; Frediani, too, had a torch. The huge shadow of
Belzoni followed along the walls; the granite twinkled in the first light
of ten long centuries. At the end of the passage was an open pit which
they descended along a rope, and at the depth of the pit were passages
thick with dark and silence. Ghostlike arborisations of nitre hung on
these lower walls, some projecting in fantastic ropes. Belzoni went off
on one trail, Frediani on another. Presently the giant arrived at the
door of the chamber of the tomb.
“I walked slowly two or three paces, and then stood still to contemplate
the place where I was. Whatever it might be, I certainly considered
myself in the centre of that pyramid which from time immemorial had been
the subject of the obscure conjecture of many hundred travellers, ancient
and modern. My Torch, formed of a few wax candles, gave but a faint
light.”
He heard a sound of footsteps, and Frediani entered with his candles.
But the treasure of the pyramid? The sarcophagus of Khaf-ra, King of
Egypt, was cut in the floor, the lid was awry, and the stone coffin “full
of a great quantity of earth and stones.” Who had violated it in the long
course of history’s four thousand years? No one knows. There is evidence
that the Caliph Al Mamun had forced the pyramid, but there is no evidence
that he found the mummy in its place. There are old Arabic tales of kings
encased in figures of gold, with magical golden snakes on their crowns
which spread their hoods in anger, hissed, and struck at the intruders.
All is legend and myth. The forced tunnel, however, had certainly once
entered the original passages, but later on the violated masonry had
fallen in, and barred the way.
Europe of the Dark Ages had never known of the attempt; the East had
forgotten. The musing mind sees Al Mamun at the pyramid, mounted on a
nervous Arab horse which paws the ancient sand; his mounted attendants
and bodyguard have reined up behind him—Arabs with thin dark faces fierce
as desert hawks. Captives, Christians for the most part, are digging
away at the side of the great mass,—men of Byzantium, fair-haired Norman
sailors blown on the African coast by a storm, little Spaniards from the
mountain kingdoms which are so valiantly battling the Moors. And King
Khaf-ra, whom the Greeks called Chephren, sleeps he within in “the dark
house of the counting of the years?”
There were Arabic inscriptions on the walls, written with charcoal, but
the characters were nearly imperceptible, and rubbed off into dust at
the slightest touch. Belzoni thought he discerned an inscription which
may be thus translated, “The Master Mohamed Ahmed has opened them, and
the Master Othman attended this, and the King Ali Mohamed at first ...
to the closing up.” Sir Richard Burton, however, perhaps the greatest of
all Arabic scholars, will have it that the Arabic characters as Belzoni
transcribed them are for the most part unintelligible. And there the
matter rests.
The Belzonis spent two more years in Egypt, and returned to London in
September, 1819.