The royal sepulchre is a granite chamber with a flat roof, nineteen feet high, thirty-four feet long, and seventeen feet wide.

Here are neither figures nor inscriptions; nothing but a granite sarcophagus, lidless and mutilated.

Such were the precautions taken against invaders; and the result showed that they were effectual, for the pyramid guarded its deposit during more than four thousand years (Note 28).

But the very weight of the materials was a more serious danger.

To prevent the sepulchral chamber from being crushed by the three hundred feet of stone which stood over it, five low hollow spaces, one over the other, were left above it.
The last is sheltered by a pointed roof, formed of two enormous slabs (Note 29) leaning one against the other.