Still, the three seem, all of them, to deserve description, and to challenge a place in “the story of Egypt,” which has never yet been told without some account of the marvels of each of them.  The smallest of the three was a square of three hundred and fifty-four feet each way, and had a height of two hundred and eighteen feet.  It covered an area of two acres, three roods, and twenty-one poles, or about that of an ordinary London square.  The cubic contents amounted to above nine million feet of solid masonry, and are calculated to have weighed 702,460 tons.  The height was not very impressive.  Two hundred and twenty feet is an altitude attained by the towers of many churches, and the “Pyramid of the Sun” at Teotihuacan did not fall much short of it; but the mass was immense, the masonry was excellent, and the ingenuity shown in the construction was great.  Sunk in the rock from which the pyramid rose, was a series of sepulchral chambers.  One, the largest, almost directly under the apex of the pyramid, was empty.  In another, which had an arched roof, constructed in the most careful and elaborate way, was found the sarcophagus of the king, Men-kau-ra, to whom tradition assigned the building, formed of a single mass of blue-black basalt, exquisitely polished and beautifully carved, externally eight feet long, three feet high, and three feet broad, internally six feet by two.  In the sarcophagus was the wooden coffin of the monarch, and on the lid of the coffin was his name.  The chambers were connected by two long passages with the open air; and another passage had, apparently, been used for the same purpose before the pyramid attained its ultimate size.  The tomb-chamber, though carved in the rock, had been paved and lined with slabs of solid stone, which were fastened to the native rock by iron cramps.  The weight of the sarcophagus which it contained, now unhappily lost, was three tons.

[Illustration:  SECTION OF THE THIRD PYRAMID, SHOWING PASSAGES.]

[Illustration:  TOMB-CHAMBER OF THE THIRD PYRAMID.]

The “Second Pyramid,” which stands to the north-east of the Third, at the distance of about two hundred and seventy yards, was a square of seven hundred and seven feet each way, and thus covered an area of almost eleven acres and a half, or nearly double that of the greatest building which Rome ever produced—­the Coliseum.  The sides rose at an angle of 52 deg. 10’; and the perpendicular height was four hundred and fifty-four feet, or fifty feet more than that of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral.  The cubic contents are estimated at 71,670,000 feet; and their weight is calculated at 5,309,000 tons.  Numbers of this vast amount convey but little idea of the reality to an ordinary reader, and require to be made intelligible by comparisons.  Suppose, then, a solidly built stone house, with walls a foot thick, twenty feet of frontage, and thirty feet of depth from front to back; let the walls be twenty-four feet high and have a foundation of six feet; throw