* The blocks which still exist are of white limestone.  Letronne, after having asserted in his youth (Recherches sur Dicuil, p. 107), on the authority of a fragment attributed to Philo of Byzantium, that the facing was formed of polychromatic zones of granite, of green breccia and other different kinds of stone, renounced this view owing to the evidence of Vyse.  Perrot and Chipiez have revived it, with some hesitation.

** Herodotus, ii. 125, the word “point” should not be taken literally.  The Great Pyramid terminated, like its neighbour, in a platform, of which each side measured nine English feet (six cubits, according to Diodorus Siculus, i. 63), and which has become larger in the process of time, especially since the destruction of the facing.  The summit viewed from below must have appeared as a sharp point.  “Having regard to the size of the monument, a platform of three metres square would have been a more pointed extremity than that which terminates the obelisks” (Letronne).

In the interior every device had been employed to conceal the exact position of the sarcophagus, and to discourage the excavators whom chance or persistent search might have put upon the right track.  Their first difficulty would be to discover the entrance under the limestone casing.  It lay hidden almost in the middle of the northern face, on the level of the eighteenth course, at about forty-five feet above the ground.  A movable flagstone, working on a stone pivot, disguised it so effectively that no one except the priests and custodians could have distinguished this stone from its neighbours.  When it was tilted up, a yawning passage was revealed,* three and a half feet in height, with a breadth of four feet.

* Strabo expressly states that in his time the subterranean parts of the Great Pyramid were accessible:  “It has on its side, at a moderate elevation, a stone which can be moved, [—­Greek phrase—­]”.  “When it has been lifted up, a tortuous passage is seen which leads to the tomb.”  The meaning of Strabo’s statement had not been mastered until Mr. Petrie showed, what we may still see, at the entrance of one of the pyramids of Dahshur, arrangements which bore witness to the existence of a movable stone mounted on a pivot to serve as a door.  It was a method of closing of the same kind as that described by Strabo, perhaps after he had seen it himself, or had heard of it from the guides, and like that which Mr. Petrie had reinstated, with much probability, at the entrance of the Great Pyramid.

[Illustration:  181a.jpg THE MOVABLE FLAGSTONE AT THE entrance to the great pyramid]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Petrie’s The Pyramids and
     Temples of Gizeh, pl. xi.