The passage is an inclined plane, extending partly through the masonry and partly through the solid rock for a distance of 318 feet; it passes through an unfinished chamber and ends in a cul-de-sac 59 feet further on.  The blocks are so nicely adjusted, and the surface so finely polished, that the joints can be determined only with difficulty.  The corridor which leads to the sepulchral chamber meets the roof at an angle of 120 deg. to the descending passage, and at a distance of 62 feet from the entrance.  It ascends for 108 feet to a wide landing-place, where it divides into two branches.  One of these penetrates straight towards the centre, and terminates in a granite chamber with a high-pitched roof.  This is called, but without reason, the “Chamber of the Queen.”  The other passage continues to ascend, but its form and appearance are altered.  It now becomes a gallery 148 feet long and some 28 feet high, constructed of beautiful Mokattam stone.  The lower courses are placed perpendicularly one on the top of the other; each of the upper courses projects above the one beneath, and the last two, which support the ceiling, are only about 1 foot 8 inches distant from each other.  The small horizontal passage which separates the upper landing from the sarcophagus chamber itself, presents features imperfectly explained.  It is intersected almost in the middle by a kind of depressed hall, whose walls are channelled at equal intervals on each side by four longitudinal grooves.  The first of these still supports a fine flagstone of granite which seems to hang 3 feet 7 inches above the ground, and the three others were probably intended to receive similar slabs.  The latter is a kind of rectangular granite box, with a flat roof, 19 feet 10 inches high, 1 foot 5 inches deep, and 17 feet broad.  No figures or hieroglyphs are to be seen, but merely a mutilated granite sarcophagus without a cover.  Such were the precautions taken against man:  the result witnessed to their efficacy, for the pyramid preserved its contents intact for more than four thousand years.* But a more serious danger threatened them in the great weight of the materials above.  In order to prevent the vault from being crushed under the burden of the hundred metres of limestone which surmounted it, they arranged above it five low chambers placed exactly one above the other in order to relieve the superincumbent stress.  The highest of these was protected by a pointed roof consisting of enormous blocks made to lean against each other at the top:  this ingenious device served to transfer the perpendicular thrust almost entirely to the lateral faces of the blocks.  Although an earthquake has to some extent dislocated the mass of masonry, not one of the stones which encase the chamber of the king has been crushed, not one has yielded by a hair’s-breadth, since the day when the workmen fixed it in its place.