Piazzi Smyth continued:
"Perhaps they did. But in case let us ask, "In what state would they left the ramp-stone over the well´s mouth?"
Certainly not blown from within outwards, as if by uncontrolled explosive force, breaking off part of the wall with it, and leaving the hole´s mouth exposed; for that would have defeated theit whole project. They would, on the contrary, have contrived a temporary support for the stone when in a position impending over the hole, partly in the floor and partly in the wall; or a support such, that when the last man had come away, the prop, would be easily withdrawn, and the stone would fall neatly into a seat already cut for it, and cemented round the edges with freshly applied lime to make the work permanent and secure. For then such stone would be flush with the rest of the ramp, and would utterly conceal from any one who should ever enter the Grand Gallery by the regular method of th first ascending passage, that there was any well-mouth whatever behind the surface of the ramp.
The original builders, then, were not those who knocked out, from within on the well side, that now lost ramp-stone, and exposed the inlet to the well-mouth as it is presently seen, near the north-west cornerof the Grand Gallery. Neither was Al Mamoun the party, for no one could have done it except by entering the well from the very bottommost depths of the subterranean region; and he, the son of Caliph Harun Al Raschid, and all his crew, did not descend further down the entrance-passage than merely to the level of his own forced hole, which is not subterranean at all. Nor is the credit claimed for any of his Arab successors, who rather allude to the well as an already existing feature in their earliest time, and one they did not understand; in large part, too, because they had only seen, and only knew of, the upper end of it in the north-west corner of the Grand Gallery floor; and there it was simply a deep hole, the beginning of darkness and the shadow of death.
Who then did burst out that now missing ramp-stone?
Who indeed ! For the whole band of Egyptological writers we have mentioned, appear to be convinced that ages before Caliph Al Mamoun made his way by blundering and smashing, - long ages, too, before Mohammed was born, and rather at and about the period of Judah being carried captive to Babylon, - the Egyptians themselves had entered the Great Pyramid by cunning art and tolerable understanding of its mere methods of construction; and had closed it again when they left. "
(S21-P455-L30 to P457-L6)
