A Poor Man's Photography at the Great Pyramid in 1865 (1870)
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A POOR MAN'S PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE GREAT PYRAMID.
C. PIAZZI SMYTH.
A POOR MAN'S PHOTOGRAPHY
AT THE
GREAT PYRAMID
IN THE YEAR 1865;
COMPARED WITH THAT OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY ESTABLISHMENT, SUBSIDIZED BY LONDON WEALTH, AND UNDER THE ORDERS OF
COL. SIR HENRY JAMES, R.E., F.R.S., DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY, AT THE SAME PLACE FOUR YEARS AFTERWARDS:
A Discourse delivered before the Edinburgh Photographic Society on December 1st, 1869;
BY
PROFESSOR C. PIAZZI SMYTH, F.R.S.S., L. & E., ASTRONOMER ROYAL FOR SCOTLAND.
LONDON:
PUBLISHED BY HENRY GREENWOOD, 2, YORK STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.
1870.
f. 27.
DEDICATED TO THE
Edinburgh Photographic Society,
WHOSE MEMBERS HAVE SHOWN SO WARM-HEARTED
AN INTEREST
IN THE SUBJECT SET FORTH IN THIS DISCOURSE, AS GREATLY TO HAVE ENCOURAGED,
UNDER CIRCUMSTANCES OF PUBLIC ADVERSITY, THEIR FAITHFUL SERVANT,
AND HON. FELLOW,
C. Piazzi myth.
CONTENTS.
Difficulties in the way of a poor man taking an independent line
of research in practical science - - - - - 11
How a poor man photographed many minute details of the Great
Pyramid of Egypt in 1865 - - - - - 12
Method for single negatives - - - - - 13
Method for single positive copying - - - - - 14
Method for double positive copying - - - - - 16
Coalition of rich ones against the poor man - - - - 19
The rich coalition's photozincographs in 1869 - - - - 21
Case 1—Errors of projection - - - - 22
Case 2—The idol Sphinx aggrandized - - - - 22
Case 3—The idol Sphinx again aggrandized - - - 23
Case 4—The sockets of the Great Pyramid misrepresented - 24
Socket-proof by the poor man's photographs - - - - 27
State of the base sides of the Great Pyramid proved by the same - 29
Of the Great Pyramid's still existing powers for accuracy - - 32
Thanks to Chairman of Society - - - - - 39
APPENDICES—List of photographs of the Great Pyramid; and a
correspondence between the Daily Review of Edinburgh, Sir
Henry James, Mr. Penrose, and Prof. Piazzi Smyth respecting
certain points of radical truth or error - - - - 2-23
After having acceded to request, and printed, as follows, my recent discourse before the Edinburgh Photographic Society in a somewhat revised and extended form, I could not but recognise with more or less of dismay, that although my own ideas of my photographs at the Great Pyramid in 1865 have been from the first, that they were lamentably faulty, imperfect, and unequal—causing me to yearn, though in vain, through each succeeding year, for any opening whereby I might try to replace them with some better attempts—yet in this discourse I have been insensibly led on by the argument to be speaking almost all the time as it were in defence of these very photographs, or as though I thought much more highly of them than I really do.
Yet I trust that the impartial and intelligent reader will easily perceive that my private and theoretic ideal of excellence is not confined to the chance stage which I may have reached in practice several years ago, under rather forbidding circumstances; and if I have so often to allude to certain features of these Egyptian photographs as rather creditable and even worthy of note, it is only for the minute particulars of Pyramid construction which they contain, and as contrasted therein with the more recent photographs or photocopiographs of a rich and powerful coalition in or near London—a coalition which has tried unscrupulously to consign all my Pyramid reproductions to utter obloquy, if not oblivion; and yet whose own works at the same place, in spite of wealth, power, numbers, and more recent opportunities, have not set forth the hundredth part of the exact Pyramid particulars that mine have done; nor have they pointed to any other authorities where the said important data may be procured.
They have, therefore, not only attempted virtually to destroy the only known photographic record of certain excellences of primeval workmanship; but, as I shall presently show, what little the coalition has achieved with their own photozincographs, has been carried out in a manner purposely to throw the slur of their own coarseness or failings on the ancient building itself and the august mind under which it was reared.
To set forth, therefore, before the public what are the real powers for accuracy still existing in that grandest of all Primeval Monuments, the absolutely unique Great Pyramid—and in so far to rescue its present-day descriptions and modern character from the scientific disgrace just now sought to be inflicted upon it; as well as to demonstrate the service that good and faithful photography in the future may be of there—this is the chief object of the following pages.
C. PIAZZI SMYTH.
A POOR MAN'S PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE GREAT PYRAMID, COMPARED WITH THAT OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY ESTABLISHMENT SUBSIDIZED BY LONDON WEALTH, UNDER THE ORDERS OF COL. SIR HENRY JAMES, R.E., F.R.S., DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY, AT THE SAME PLACE FOUR YEARS AFTERWARDS : A Discourse before the Edinburgh Photographic Society, Dec. 1, 1869.
MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN,
ALAS! how seldom does it happen that a scientific man can set to work at his most favourite and even important subject of research with all the instruments of observation and apparatus of record that his intellect imagines or his heart desires!
At all events, in original inquiries, in the pure walks of science for its own sake alone, the usual question with each ordinary private scientist is not "What is the most powerful machine that can be brought to bear on some difficulty in knowledge or obstinate mystery in nature?" but, "What is the cheapest possible method by which any sufficient result may haply be obtained?" And if this be the prevailing form of the apparatus question at present, in general branches of practical science, much more must it rule in the particular branch of photography, which, according to its scale, eats off its head in silver baths; and much more entirely must it dominate there when that photography is being exercised during travel in foreign parts. Yet every traveller in strange lands ought to photograph; and the vital problem, therefore, is, "How shall such traveller, if a poor man, accomplish it?"
Now pray do not fancy that because the man is poor his work must, therefore, be necessarily bad, and his experiences uninteresting; for some of these same poor men are precisely the most ambitious souls after excellence in all society.
Urged, too, by their very poverty, they often strike out useful inventions; and though, if measured by a mere material foot rule, their instrumental apparatus may too often appear pitiably small, by exactly so much has it more promise of entering into, and passing through, the eye of the needle of nature than the ponderous coaches of the rich.
Many other poor men before me have already described to this Society, and many others after me will also, I trust, continue to describe, how they have accomplished one difficulty or another in photography, despite slender means and forbidding circumstances; and I therefore only appear now as one of a large and acknowledged band of workers, neither the first nor by any means the most worthy, but simply as one under a very peculiar pressure, i.e., as one compelled by a sudden combination of rich, hasty, and unscrupulous opponents, either to speak out on the instant before the world, or to let a favourite subject of study, during several earnestly-spent years, disappear at once and for ever beneath the heap of erroneous assertions, disparaging treatment, and bad photography which those opponents have contemptuously cast upon it.
What, then, can a poor man, and one who believes in the truth of his subject and goodness of his cause, choose to do in such a case than make a stand and speak out?
But will the Society care to hear what he has to say? That will doubtless depend in part on the intensity of the difficulties struggled with, and the degree of success with which they may in part have been overcome. These points, therefore, I will first discuss, treating them in and for themselves alone; and then, if you still approve, we will apply the final test, or that of comparison with the works of the opposite party.
HOW THE POOR MAN PHOTOGRAPHED IN EGYPT IN 1865.
When I went to Egypt just five years ago, I went—though accompanied, encouraged, and assisted by my constant helper, the partner of all my joys and sorrows—yet I went-I may say generally, alone, a private individual and a poor man. I only, in this country—save, perhaps, one other person—then saw the exceeding importance of modern scientific examination being applied without further delay to that most ancient architectural monument of all the earth, the Great Pyramid.
I alone would run any risks with regard to it; and therefore, except the helping hand which one acute reasoner and far-seeing as well as generous-minded man voluntarily and spontaneously held out, I was left by both Government and all other authorities to find my own way to the Pyramid, and pay all expenses there out of my very slender salary, not calculated to bear any such burden.
The strictest economy, therefore, had to be the order of the day; and as several other subjects of scientific observation, of a very engrossing character too, required prior attention, there was sadly little left for photography.
But photography must be taken; for what monumental research of the present age can be effectively treated without its marvellous aid. It must be taken, but the apparatus could only be very small.
METHOD FOR SINGLE NEGATIVES.
So far as dry plates were concerned, I had a camera capable of taking negative pictures so large, for me, as three inches square, and I live to regret the extravagance; for the special apparatus which I had also made at the same time for wet plates showed that one inch square, or indeed only as large as one's thumb nail, was quite enough, if properly employed, for any ordinary angle of view.
How that wet-plate apparatus, in taking single negative pictures was managed, I do not enter into now, because in the month of May, 1866, when my own time was over-occupied in preparing my book, Life and Work at the Great Pyramid, the novelties of the method were described—and very well described—to this Society by their then able Secretary, Mr. John Nicol, and his account was reported in full, as well as illustrated, in THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY for June 8th of the same year.
METHOD FOR DOUBLE NEGATIVES.
But the taking of the double or stereoscopic negatives was not then touched on; and as they furnish points illustrative of the restless craving after improvement properly characteristic of the poor man, and not unworthy of adoption elsewhere, I will venture to say something upon them now.
While the rich public has, of late years, generally settled down into a state of apathetic content to have their stereographs of every kind of subject, with the single exception only of the sun and moon, treated with no more stereographic power than that resulting from the three-inch distance apart of the lenses of an ordinary binocular camera (an unhappy invention, from the date of which the present almost total decay of public interest in stereographs took its disastrous rise), the poor man, in this case provided himself with two separate cameras, capable of being fixed, according to the subject treated and the purposes it was wanted for, at any distance asunder, from three inches to three feet, and occasionally much more. And he applied to the two cameras a connecting bar to make the motions of their internal shutters—already described for a single instance by Mr. Nicol—exactly similar, simultaneous, and instantaneous also, if required,
This double apparatus I now exhibit, battered and bruised, as it came home four years ago from the campaign of the pyramids: and you will observe that one movement of one hand in one direction is enabled both to open and close the apertures of both cameras either quickly or slowly—slowly enough to suit the faintest objects at sunset; or quickly enough, as actually proved by an experiment, to take a bird on the wing.
METHOD OF SINGLE POSITIVE COPYING.
Let us now suppose that all the negatives required have been obtained in the field, and by two opposing parties. The rich man's servants have brought home his large glass plates in ponderous boxes; and then they busy themselves, according to his orders, in copying the negatives by the simple mechanical method of superposition, producing thereby positive copies in either silver or carbon, photolithography or photozincography—a dull and not very artistic or suggestive method, because it merely reproduces in positive just the scope and scene of view which was taken in by the mere material sides of the camera at the place.
Not so, however, acts the poor man, with his little box of very little negatives brought home modestly in his waistcoat pocket. Therewith he sits him down at a table, having a compound achromatic microscope before him—either the ordinary single one, or a double one like this now exhibited, and intended for viewing two pictures at once stereoscopically—and then, revelling in the marvellous magnifying power of that admirable optical instrument of modern times (which we owe mainly to the father of the latest elected, and not the least, of the professors in the Edinburgh University, Mr. Lister), the poor man wanders at will, truly the monarch of all he surveys, over the various parts of each picture; recalls all the circumstances under which it was taken; discovers characteristic detail which he never dreamed of before; and then—each picture you will remember having been taken square—he decides whether a positive copy should be shaped as a long, i.e., horizontal, rectangle, or as a tall, i.e., vertical, rectangle; whether it should include from side to side of the negative plate, or stop short of its extremer parts, in order to secure a better balance of light and shade, or a more harmonious composition of lines and angles; whether he should give preponderance to the sky or to the foreground; or whether some special scientific purpose may not be better served by extracting one little subject alone out of the whole scene, and making a very highly-magnified picture of that one item by itself.
With all these notes taken at the microscope, the poor man then inserts his little negative into a copying and magnifying camera, and proceeds to realise all these various positive pictures, hitherto only sketched out in art or scientific idea, and makes them of any size that he can afford.
The twelve small pictures shown at the upper end of the room (all of them pure photographs, without any of that falsification which arises from touching up, stopping out, printing in other skies, and such like improper and untrue tricks), are a sample of about 150 that I prepared in this way for the oxyhydrogen lantern, and of which the more effective have been freely exhibited again and again on large screens before many public audiences.
The rather larger ones at the lower end of the room are the remains of a set of about sixty, twice partly exhibited in public, and were prepared originally with a view of making octavo-sized book plates; while the middle set of twenty quarto-sized glass plates are the commencement of a new series never exhibited in public before this evening.
In the way of definition, I may call attention to No. 24; for, although it is magnified up to 1 0 × 8 inches from one of the small or one-inch-sized negatives, and although the Arab before the tomb door occupies only a subsidiary portion of the whole scene, yet the threads composing the cloth of his garment are discernible in those parts not affected by his breathing. No. 25, on the contrary, is an example of bad definition; but that is from a dry plate of the needlessly clumsy size of three inches square.
METHOD OF DOUBLE POSITIVE COPYING.
So far, then, for single copying. For the stereoscopic copying, however, there was required something more than the ordinary "copying and magnifying" camera, seeing that the problem in this stereoscopic work is—given two pictures on separate glass plates, it is required to make a stereoscopic pair from them, or any small part of them, on one glass plate and by a single copying operation: the original pictures, too, being perchance by no means
symmetrically placed (by error of adjustment of the glasses in the bath-slides, or otherwise) on their respective plates, as in these two diagram examples, where the dark surface shows the sky of the negative, and the small dotted rectangle the only portion of the whole scene required for the stereograph now in hand.
We must begin, then, here with a new copying camera, or a new head to the old one, having two object glasses, distant from each other, horizontally, centre to centre, a quantity to be decided by the particular human eyes and instrumental stereoscopes afterwards to be employed in viewing the finished pictures, and which distance I have settled for myself and a superior class of achromatic stereoscope presently to be described at 2.7 inches.
We next put the two negatives into a double frame, like this now exhibited, to carry them in front of the object glasses, each half of the frame being so provided with three adjusting screws and antagonistic springs that each negative may have three motions given to it independently of the other, viz., horizontal, vertical, and rotatory in its own plane. By these means we may get the magnified images of the required parts of the negative on the greyed focussing glass very exactly side by side, on a level, and also with their objects in their own middle pictorial distance at the precise 2.7 inches apart—a very important feature to be attended to for the comfort of future spectators.
But we cannot yet take a copy of these semi-Siamesed fragments on a photographic plate, because the images of the parts we want are overlapped or even covered by images of parts we do not want. To remedy that evil a vertical axial diaphragm, also now exhibited, is introduced inside the copying camera, toothed to avoid reflections of light being thrown towards the picture, and pushed up just such a distance in front of the ground glass that, while it still completely prevents one image overlapping the other, it at the same time annihilates its own shadow, and allows one picture to melt into its intended partner at an invisible line, thus:—
and we may then copy off, on a single stereoscopic glass plate of the usual size, and at one opening of the camera, just the double rectangle marked out, neglecting all other parts of the two pictures necessarily, because they are beyond the limits of the said stereo. plate. Occasionally one of the two separate negatives is lighter than the other, and reproduces itself on the collodion plate more quickly; but the extremest difference yet found has been corrected and equalised to the slower member of the pair, by having two or three plates of so-called transparent, but, in reality, slightly greenish glass placed between the paler negative and the source of illumination, generally a window looking towards the north.
In this manner have been prepared the twelve stereographs now on the President's table—all derived from various parts of these same small, or one-inch-sized, negatives, but all equally magnified up into pictures, each member of which is 2.7 inches broad and 3.25 inches high; \ast and I leave it to gentlemen present, after the formal meeting is over, to try them, and say whether they do not find both a satisfactory amount of stereoscopic effect and no strain on the eyes—at least, when they look at them with the form of stereoscope which I have arranged for myself and for these Egyptian pictures; the chief characteristics of such stereoscope being, besides a stand with reflector and angular adjustments, achromatic lenses of unusually large (1.8 inches) diameter and short (3.6 inches) focal length, together with, over and above the ordinary focussing adjustment, a right and left-handed screw movement for the convenient alteration of the horizontal distances of these lenses apart to suit the eyes of each spectator.
Indeed, this last adjustment is so exceedingly important to get the best optical performance without strain on the eye and the brain, that it is my private opinion that no stereoscope should be offered for sale without it.
COALITION OF RICH ONES AGAINST THE POOR MAN.
Such, then, has been, in so far—or sadly below his original aspirations and his hopes too of practical success should a second occasion ever become possible to him—the poor man's performance of the photographic part of his work at the Great Pyramid in 1865. And that was work, or, rather, labour of love, exercised in as grandly promising a field and noble a cause connected with the earliest origin of nations, the source of inspired Patriarchal religion and the manner of commencement of all human civilisation long before written history began—as time has yet opened up before the modern world—but which the said world was by no means fully appreciating, when the poor man threw himself into the gap. But the work itself, first in all its details, and then as indicative of its really glorious cause, after three more years of untiring labour at home, the same humble servant of science has endeavoured, though at still further ruinous expense to himself, to set before the public in his several printed volumes, entitled Life and Work at the Great Pyramid, and The Antiquity of Intellectual Man, and also in papers printed in both the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for 1866-7-8; and now, after almost two years more have passed away, and when the human mind is at last just beginning, at some few points far between, to kindle into intelligent appreciation on the important Pyramid subject, and when hardly a week passes without some correspondent or convert appearing from as far East as India, or as far West as the United States of America—what think you has been close to him, in his own land, the poor man's cheering and most encouraging reward?
It has been this:—A coalition of rich individuals in and about London, has recently burst into his subject, animated apparently by some special feeling against any high knowledge having existed in ancient days, and a determination to upset every thing that the long labours of the poor man, following faithfully in the track first pointed out by the late John Taylor, have succeeded in disclosing. A few weeks ago, accordingly, he had the honour of receiving from that influential London party, and under a cover inscribed "On Her Majesty's Service," besides being marked as one of the public Documents of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, this pamphlet, entitled Notes on the Great Pyramid of Egypt, &c., &c., by Colonel Sir Henry James, Royal Engineers, and Director-General of the Ordnance Survey; and wherein, although the writer gives something of a catalogue raisonnée of all authors and measurers of note or value at the Great Pyramid, from Professor Greaves, of Oxford, 230 years ago, down to and including his own officers and men this last spring, yet he has carefully omitted all mention of the poor man's name, books, measures, photographs, and everything else of his labours at the Pyramid:—that is, all direct mention of them; for the autocrat of the pamphlet indulges on another page by indirect insinuations and nameless abuse, sufficiently interpretable, in denouncing all of them (though on little more than his own erroneous representations) as being neither more nor less, in his estimation, than vicious absurdities, extravagant nonsense, and folly worse than anything, even than "the crystallized mud theory" of dark times during total ignorance of all physical science!
Now is not this agreeable information for the Astronomer-Royal for Scotland, though working at this subject in his private capacity only, to receive "On Her Majesty's Service" (if, indeed, that is true), and to be told that the pamphlet containing it all is expected not only to serve for the Pyramid information of grown persons, but to be used also, far and wide, for the same instruction of the rising generation "in our national and other schools;" and finally, that the principal expense of this onslaught upon him has been most liberally and generously defrayed by that so wealthy lady in London whom he has never seen—Miss Burdett Coutts!
Can I, or ought I, to be altogether silent in such a case? Could I have been treated worse if I had gone to the Great Pyramid only to destroy it; and, as its bitter enemy, to depreciate its original mechanical structure and undervalue the ability and intention of its primeval designer? Well, I will not attempt to say much on those points just now, because—as I have already demonstrated elsewhere, a large number of both the blunders and something worse of this too remarkable pamphlet in its literary and numerical portions—it is better here to examine only its photographic contents, and to inquire with regard to them before this experienced and in the art-science learned meeting—What is there in the photographs of the pamphlet just issued by the rich and powerful Pyramid coalition in the south to justify them in their out and out attempt to stamp on, abuse, and drive out of existence the poor man's previous work of the same order, but far more abundant and in some things much more accurate, in the selfsame field?
THE RICH COALITION'S PHOTOZINCOGRAPHS IN 1869.
Now the photographs, or photozincographs rather, of the coalition pamphlet being only four in number, will not occupy us very long in their examination; and they are all arranged before the room in one view on the front of the President's table, while the President himself has another copy of the pamphlet in his hand.
Case 1.—The frontispiece of the pamphlet, though fair enough in general effect, is rather anomalous in its place, seeing that it does not represent anything about the Great Pyramid at all, but the Mohammedan-built Nilometer near Cairo. Nor is it even as such represented sufficiently well for scientific purposes; for, besides the absolute sizes not being given, you will find, if you take compasses and measure differentially the cubits on the central stem, that both their lengths and breadths decrease continually from centre to either the top or bottom of the picture, showing that the photograph labours under the well-known evil of barrel-shaped distortion in the lens employed.
In such a case the poor man would have applied the same method of correction which he actually did employ in the same country four years previously, when he supplied himself with these black and white measuring rods—some 50 and some 100 inches long—and fixed or hung them about any important subject which he photographed; as, in fact, you may recognise in many of his pictures now exhibited, and test the dimensions of objects represented there by means of the very scales you now see before you.
Case 2.—The next photozincograph, or that marked "Plate I.," is stated in the description to give the form of the Great Pyramid: and it is, moreover, the only general and entire view of the Great Pyramid in the pamphlet confessedly upon that monument. We turn to the plate, therefore, with anxiety, hoping to study there minutely the intimate structure of the most pure and blameless building ever erected by man, the only known ancient building neither defiled by the worship of false gods nor inscribed to human glorification;—when lo! by a mere trick of the soldier photographer, the most prominent object of the scene is made to be, not the Great Pyramid, not the best remnant of peaceful Patriarchal days that has come down to our latter and war-oppressed times, but that atrocious and biggest idol of all the earth, the so-called, but very different, Great Sphinx.
So far away has the Pyramid been put, in order to allow this dreadful Sphinx of another age to shove its noseless face into the foreground, that nothing of the successive courses of the Pyramid's masonry, and many other equally important features, can be made out on the paper of this Ordnance photozincograph.
If, therefore, you honestly want real information on the Great Pyramid masonry, you must come back, after all, to some of the poor man's unmentioned but previously-existing photographs, such as Nos. 13, 37, 17, and others, where you may study that masonry's various forms and instructive methods without interference from totally extraneous objects.
Case 3. But the third photozincograph of this pamphlet, or that marked there "Plate II.," ought to be something vastly better when the introduction says of it:—"The manner in which the Pyramid was originally cased may be seen in the photozincograph No.2, which represents the second Pyramid, on which the casing stones of the top still remain in their places."
Now these things are, without doubt, very important in Pyramidology; we turn, therefore, eagerly to behold them, when lo! that horrid, monstrous idol—that idol of all idols, the Sphinx-stares us full and broad in the face once again, and from the best part of the foreground!
Were the Royal Engineers taken away from their proper employments in this country, and sent out to Egypt to do honour, and worship, and reverence to that iniquitous remnant of old idolatry, the half-bestial Sphinx—or to measure the Great Pyramid and illustrate the scientific refinements of its masonry so absolutely pure from all idolatry, whether of man or of false gods?
Let the Royal Engineer's works answer for them; and for all that they, or the Ordnance Survey, or their subsidisers, would, if they could, under another name, teach the poor little innocents "in our national and other schools." Yea, indeed, let their works answer for what was in their hearts, especially when contrasted with the poor man's picture, No. 14, representing in large the very identical casing stones of the second Pyramid, and nothing else unconnected, which the Royal Engineers ought to, and might, have given us on this occasion.
CASE 4. THE SOCKETS OF THE GREAT PYRAMID MISREPRESENTED.
But surely the last photograph of the pamphlet will make up for all these various defects of the earlier ones, especially as it is said in the introduction "to show the position of one of the sockets with reference to one of the present dilapidated corners (the north-east) of the Great Pyramid, with one of the Royal Engineers holding his staff in the farthest angle of the socket."
There, too, sure enough, you may see the Royal Engineer holding up a black and not very straight stick—possibly his walking stick. But where is the all-important socket? There is absolutely nothing identifiable as such! Was there, then, no proper socket in existence, no fiducial socket at that angle to receive the corner stone of the outside or limiting casing of the venerable structure, and assist thereby in marking out the exact original size of its giant base to all posterity! Was there really no such socket in existence at that corner of the Great Pyramid when the military photographers were there? Or, have they photographed the surface of wretched, loose, mere dust and rubbish, filling up and concealing the socket, and called that miserable stuff by the veritable name of the accurately carved and almost mathematically true socket, hollowed by the orders of the ancient architect for a special and important purpose, in the still sound, and perfect living rock of the hill?
The question is a serious one as affecting the credit and ability of the ancient builders compared with their modern successors; and bears also not a little on the grand disputation of the day as to whether civilised man's career has been a continual history of self-development from a previous lower stage, even originally of savagedom and bestial ignorance; or whether his early period upon earth was something totally and essentially different from that, as, indeed, the Bible teaches us that it was.
These sockets, however, of the Great Pyramid are, most fortunately, matters on which Sir Henry James, though he has never seen them, would claim for himself a most extensive and intelligent acquaintance, and from the grandeur and power of his position, with subsidised officers and men for the work, he expresses himself thus contemptuously of certain poor and unsubsidised individuals, who, in spite of their poverty, had already visited, and worked to the utmost extent of their means on, the scene.
"Considering," says Sir H. James, "the number of people who have undertaken to measure this (the Great) Pyramid, it is very remarkable that no one had measured all the four sides (of the base, from socket to socket) before Mr. Inglis did, and more especially because the positions of the sockets were known to within a foot or two, and they were only covered by a little sand easily removable by the hand; and nothing could be more simple to any practical engineer than to measure the distances between their extreme corners."
Now, this statement is at each and every step of it in such utter, such flat, such merciless contradiction of what I had already published in my Life and Work at the Great Pyramid and elsewhere, and is so entirely unsupported by any proofs, facts, or arguments beyond the assertion of a high military chief, who says it is so; and I am so evidently the main person alluded to under the term of "people," meaning those vulgar, and as having disgracefully neglected to do what a certain Mr. Inglis is stated to have done immediately after, and independently of, me—that I can only turn to my faithful photographs, which cannot lie, and set forth what they contain.
It should, indeed, have been mentioned by Sir Henry James that Mr. Inglis was just as completely subsidised for his work at the Great Pyramid as were his own Royal Engineers, having been paid to do it by his employer, Mr. Aiton, then a very wealthy man, and allowed by him to engage as many Arabs as he pleased to assist; and it was by their excavations, aided in the case of two out of the four sockets by my voluntary assistance in advising where to dig, when their own efforts had failed, that Mr. Inglis and party stood at the end of April, 1865, in a position never occupied, I believe, by any explorer at the Great Pyramid before, viz., of having all four of the corner sockets visible at one view.*
The French, under Bonaparte, in 1790, were the first to discover, by But Sir Henry James would have it inferred that every one knew the place of all the said sockets before "to within a foot or two;" and partly because, as he more especially declares, "they were covered only with a little sand easily removable by the hand," so that, in fact, it would be false to talk of any excavation, or pick or shovel work, at all.
Indeed, according to him, Mr. Inglis ought not to have sent in bills to Mr. Aiton charging for the hire of two large posses of Arabs for several days with their iron instruments of excavation in hard and stony ground; for Sir Henry James states positively and officially that at and before that period "the sockets were covered only with a little sand easily removable by the haud," and Sir Henry James is a Colonel of Engineers.
Now desert sand is very easily distinguishable in a photograph, as it is also by all its physical and chemical qualities, from the lime-stone rubbish of a ruinous building. The photographs then, they are the things to settle the assertion of the Director-General of the Ordnance Survey; and how fortunate for Mr. Inglis that I had taken some of these faithful testimonies of the Pyramid both before he arrived there, and also took others afterwards, specially to show what the sockets were like, and what material he had had to break through in order to expose them, after their long entombment, to the blue sky of heaven once again.*
excavation through the surrounding rubbish, two of the Great Pyramid's ancient sockets, or corner-stone foundation holes, showing how far its base had once extended before the dilapidation of its flanks began. These sockets were the north-east and north-west. The north-east one they have carefully engraved a plan of in their great Egyptian work; and though speedily covered again with rubbish, that socket was once more opened by Colonel Howard Vyse, in 1837, and has been seen by many persons: yet on my arrival at the Pyramid in January, 1865, there was nothing of it then visible on the surface of the ground. But of the north-west socket the French work gives no plan, and it was one of the two which Mr. Inglis and the Arabs failed to find by all their digging at guess.
The north-east and north-west possibly after a sleep of only ten to thirty years; but the south-east and south-west possibly after one of a thousand years.
SOCKET-PROOF BY THE POOR MAN'S PHOTOGRAPHS.
Let me first, therefore, direct your attention to my photograph No. 25. It represents the south-west foot of the Great Pyramid, and the ground in front of it, before Mr. Inglis and his Arabs began their work of excavation. No socket is there visible and no sand; only the hard and flattened surface of semi-concreted limestone soil strewed with stones.
But in No. 26, taken after those excavations, and after my assistance had been asked and given to help the excavators to find the socket by application of John Taylor's Pyramid theory, their own practical attempts during several previous days having ended in failure, and in proving that they, at least, did not know "its position to within a foot or two,"—behold the depth!—much more than a hand scrape, for it is near thirty inches that they had to dig (on my directions) before they came to the socket; and there see its exquisite white and levelled surface of actual rock in situ, as well as the hard and stony composition of the rude rubbish ground above that had to be cut through in order to get at it. And in looking at that socket too, behold a recovered feature of the ancient Pyramid architecture not improbably alluded to by the inspired patriarch Job; and a feature all whose excellences of mechanical shape, size, hardness, and truth, were necessary to the character and endurance of the monument through the more than forty centuries that it has survived; but a feature which, so far as this south-western socket is concerned, instead of being known to every one, was never described in any European work on the Great Pyramid, so far as I am aware, until I described it and gave the measures thereof in my Life and Work, two years before the Royal Engineers went to Egypt.
Then No. 27 similarly shows the ground in front of the northeast foot of the Great Pyramid before the excavations began; and, again, no socket is visible and no sand, only hardened lime-soil, and stones. But after the excavation, behold the socket, the real and ancient socket—admire, too, its well-cut and admirably levelled floor in both No. 28 and No. 29!—a witness it is (clothed in its own pure white, and almost twelve feet square) to speak to the unrivalled workmanship of the ancient builders, and still more to the comprehensive far-seeing design of its primeval architect.
There, too, is Mr. Inglis (Mr. Aiton being then absent in Palestine) with his foremen of Arab diggers, the two shieks of the Pyramid; there, too, is my attendant, Alee Dobree, who would insist on putting himself into the picture, for had he not brought up and adjusted my measuring bars which were to be photographed to give the scale? and Mr. Inglis had just before told me with wonder and admiration, "I have levelled all over the floor of the socket with my spirit level, and can find no error in it." Only think what a testimony is not that to correct work after 4,040 years have passed away! Will it be said of any of our works, after a like amount of time has elapsed, that men of that future day, with all their improved instruments of precision, can find no error in what we have done.
No. 30, again, shows the socket at the north-west corner of the Great Pyramid, and you see there the same white level floor and the same stony soil that had to be cut through (upon my indications in this case as well as in that of the south-west socket, obtained only by theory and angular measures, after the practical plans of both Mr. Inglis and the Arabs had totally failed) before it was discovered. And, finally, No. 31 shows the south-east socket, the smallest but the deepest down of all the four sockets of the Great Pyramid, and covered it had been with the thickest and stoniest coating of rubbish, concreted almost into very rock. In the presence, indeed, of only this one photograph, and fortified by that regard which all the world is rapidly acquiring for the remarkable witnessing capacities of the art-science of photography, I would ask the President formally—Lives there, sir, the man—in Scotland at least—with hands so hard or horny, or so totally unlike human hands, that he could, whether easily, as Sir Henry James declares of himself, or painfully, as I should fancy, have grubbed out that hole and cleared that socket in that material, as you see it before you, with his hands alone? Take your magnifying glasses, gentlemen, and examine the rough and angular stones still sticking in the steep sides of the hole.
Look at them, also, in the stereoscopic view, No. 48, on the table; remember, too, the cementing nature of lime-stone dust, washed by occasional rains and exposed to pressure, and then pause before any of you undertake the task which the Director-General of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain has laid himself under something more than moral obligations, both to the public in general and Miss Burdett Coutts in particular, to perform with nothing but his "bare hands."
STATE OF THE BASE SIDES OF THE GREAT PYRAMID.
Inasmuch as Mr. Inglis's linear measures of the four sides of the Great Pyramid's base from socket to socket, were made in intimate concert with myself, I relieving him of the more difficult duty of taking the angular measures required, both geometrical and astronomical, and he giving me in return—with the subsequent consent of his employer and paymaster, Mr Aiton, and expressly for publishing as I have published, and was the first, if not still the only, person to publish—his full and detailed linear measures, Sir Henry James might have said something of both Mr. Aiton and myself as necessarily connected with those measures. But he has preferred to give all honour to one, who (though very commendable in his own place) neither did the work on his own idea or expense, nor published it to the world, and to fling dishonour on every one beside.
It was no doubt an important contribution to Pyramidology when I was first able to publish the only set of measures that had then ever been taken in modern times on all four sides of the Great Pyramid from socket to socket, yet I explained both then, and subsequently, why that result must be looked on only as a distant approximation to the truth; the main reason being that, over and above Mr. Inglis and Mr. Aiton too, having had no sufficient measuring apparatus with them, an amount of excavation and clearing of the ground would have to be performed before all the parts to be measured upon became visible, that must inevitably cost several thousand pounds-a sufficient obstacle surely in the way of any poor man unassisted.
But Sir Henry James, the official representative of this country's accurate surveying, has declared, as you have just heard from the coalition pamphlet, that at that very time "nothing could be more simple than to measure the distances" between the sockets. i.e., to determine the correct length of the ancient base-sides of the Great Pyramid.
Now when he says that "nothing could be more simple," we are entitled to assume, over and above all the sockets being discovered and cleared, which has already been proved in the negative, that each pair of adjacent sockets, being the terminal stations of their own base-sides, could "see" each other; for that is a sine qua non for the ends of every accurate base-line that has ever been measured anywhere, and especially for those measured by Sir Henry James's predecessors in his important office, with Colonel Colby's celebrated Ordnance compensation bars.
And yet, will it be believed that of all the four sockets of the Great Pyramid, not a single one can see any other; and that not by a narrow graze only, but by reason of a huge, high, long, and broad hill of stony matter lying right between every pair of them; so steep in some places as to be next to impossible even to stand upon, and so made up of stones jammed, wedged, and concreted together, as to be very difficult to make any sensible impression upon either with spades or pickaxes!
Something of this might perhaps be inferred from the lamentable failure of Sir Henry James's own men to bring home a decent measure, he having found it necessary to cut no less than ten whole inches off their result, in place of showing that it was true to within something like the hundredth of an inch. But the whole of the damaging statement must be received and allowed, because these four intercepting hills are duly represented in the poor man's photographs of the Great Pyramid, and in a manner that enables their dimensions and constitution to be nicely ascertained.
Thus refer, if you please, to my photograph No. 7, or a view of the west side of the Great Pyramid, and you will see that the central mound of its base-side rubbish rises there to within nineteen courses of a very conspicuously thick layer of masonry, which is the thirty-sixth from the bottom, and is traceable at the same height on every side of the Pyramid, all whose courses are horizontal and parallel.
We have, therefore, the lowest sixteen courses at least of the Pyramid left to measure the vertical height of the long top of this adventitious heap of modern rubbish; and the united thicknesses of those courses, according to the measures of the French Academicians in 1799, as well as my own in 1865 (you will look in vain for any Ordnance measures of them), amount to close on 600 inches. That is, proving a hill of compacted stone rubbish 600 inches high at its culminating point; and it is also nearly 7,000 inches long and 1,200 broad; opaque enough too, surely it must be, to prevent any living man at one socket seeing, with mortal eyes right through the central line of this hill's whole length, anything of his fellow observer standing at the next, but yet far off, corner socket.
The rubbish mound on the south side, similarly tested by my photograph No.9, is proved to reach rather higher, or to 680 inches in vertical height above the Pyramid pavement or true base; while the heap on the east side rises to 630 inches of vertical height, and that on the northern side to close on 600 inches.
This last one was cross-cut in three places by Colonel Howard Vyse, in 1837; and he employed for that purpose several hundred Arabs during many weeks. But to have cut through it longitudinally, so as to enable one socket really to see the other, and to show all the remnants of the pavement and actual base-side of the Pyramid required to be measured upon, as well as the sockets, and to accomplish that by so broad-floored a cut all the way as to allow the Ordnance compensation bars with their tents, microscopes, and tripods to be employed in measuring the distance between, would have required thousands of Arabs. Yet to make so long and broad a cut or clearing is what Colonel Sir Henry James is, in honour, bound to do; and that not only on the north side, but the east, west, and south sides of the Great Pyramid also, before his statement in derogation of unsubsidised "people" at the Pyramid can be made decently true for the future, though not for the past.
We can only hope, therefore, that his most liberal patroness will supply the Director-General of the Ordnance Survey with money enough to engage many thousands of labourers; or otherwise he may be driven—before he has accomplished with his own hands the removal of the "perfectly simple" obstacle—may be driven, I say, to end his days as a mere navvie working at an interminable task.
OF THE GREAT PYRAMID'S STILL EXISTING POWERS FOR ACCURACY.
But though I may hope so fervently that his generous coalition friends will supply the Colonel with funds enough for the above preparatory purpose of dealing with mere heaps of modern rubbish, I cannot be equally anxious that the replenished knight should be so much further endowed as to enable him next to attack the Great Pyramid itself, and become our final authority for the accurate mensuration of either its base-sides, or, indeed, any of its other original and ancient fiducial markings.
And why so, do you ask?
I have already shown (see Appendix pp. 11 and 20) that he has tampered with the published numbers of the Great Pyramid's base twice over, to make them suit his own mere fancies of what ought to be, in a manner that would have ruined any smaller man for ever; but which, on the principle, apparently, of that being but a choleric word in the captain which in the soldier is flat blasphemy, seems to be thought so little of in him—that I must endeavour here to add to that sin in a poor man some further proofs from the Colonel's own photozincographs that he is acting more against, than for, the Pyramid in all the precious and fiducial points of its construction : so that we need never expect from him any correct account of the Pyramid's accurate features, though it is on them alone that all our hopes rest of being able to interpret what was in the mind of the ancient designer when he planned the most grand, successful, and enduring monument which the world has yet seen.
Look, then, if you please, gentlemen, once more at the Colonel's last photozincograph, or his Plate III. Already I have shown you that, though claiming so to do, it really contains nothing of the mechanical perfections, or actual figure of the socket; but now, I pray you, attend further to the stones forming on the plate the upper corner of the Pyramid. Did you ever see such hideously black, as well as rude and mis-shapen masses, before?
The blackness is, over large parts, as the blackness of soot in that photozincograph which is being published amongst our countrymen as the latest and best reproduction of the Pyramid; yet the material so represented is in very truth of a light and brilliant tint of Naples yellow; blinding bright in sunshine, and, even when in the shade, receiving in that transparent Egyptian atmosphere so large a gift of reflected light, that it is still comparatively bright and luminous to behold, as in fact you may see in many of my photographs again and again. What, then, can Sir Henry James mean by condeming them to oblivion and publishing as true his own party's views of stones embued by himself with the darkness and blackness of night?
Some strangers here this evening, not practically versed in the art-science, may possibly imagine that if the photograph did so represent the stones as heaps of darkness that they must have been so in nature: but I beg to correct that popular error.
Insufficient exposure of any photographic plate may give, in the positive copy therefrom, a midnight instead of a noonday effect; and either by ignorance or design one part of a whole subject-scene may have so much less exposure than another as to render that part only in blackness, contrasting therefore egregiously with the other parts which have received full exposure. Hence it is almost as necessary for truthful results that a photographic camera shall be in the hands of men both honest and able, as with the pen of a ready writer; such poor pen being, of itself, just as ready to forge an iniquity as to preach virtue.
With the camera indeed, when properly used, there is a certain innate power of its own to give a reproduction of nature with such an infinity of microscopic detail and accidental circumstance, as to make it equal to thousands and tens of thousands of witnesses; yet it has no capacity to prevent itself being at other times so misused, whether by blundering or craft, as to give to those who are not in the secret a most opposite, or at least a negative, rendering of that which it is stated, or desired to do.
Whether the absolute blackness, then, of these Pyramid stones as given in the Ordnance photozincograph Plate III. is due to the one or the other of these failings in the mind of the military photographers employed (or of their commanding officer, for if he gave orders to mis-represent the Pyramid, we may be sure that they would be obeyed by all under his command; just as faithfully, indeed, by those splendid soldiers the Royal Engineers have proved themselves to be in a hundred campaigns, as the most heroic orders to storm an enemy's fort in time of war), as to that question I say, we may better delay forming any conclusions until after we have considered the representations of the sad shapes and unmechanical conditions of these so black-faced stones.
The pamphlet does, no doubt, speak of that corner of the Pyramid as "dilapidated;" but then comes the question—Why did the military men choose that scene of modern dilapidation as the only close view of the Pyramid's structure in their pamphlet professedly on the accuracies of that building's original size, and even for the nice purpose of deducing the precise length of the cubit it was anciently built by? * Of these modern dilapidations we have heard enough, and far more than enough long, long ago, and indeed from all sorts of travellers to the Great Pyramid during the last 300 years.
It is by these dilapidations, for instance, or extensive removals of the whole of the outside, bevelled, smooth and finished surface to a depth of many feet, exposing the edges of the several layers of once internal masonry (i.e., mere filling-up matter, and therefore, for economy, necessarily rude) that a set of quasi stairs are formed, by which latter-day idlers get through their stupid task of ascending easily to the top of the structure, and then think, that by conceitedly standing thereon, they have excelled the Pyramid builders and brought the whole primeval structure into modern contempt. And yet all that they really prove by their antics is, that they are as entirely ignorant of what the essence and long-delayed teaching of the structure really consists in, as a cannibal South Sea Islander is of the contents and virtues of a copy of the Holy Scriptures, left with him by a missionary for some far other purpose than either being trodden under foot or helping him to cook his forbidden food.
But amongst all truly scientific men who have yet studied the Pyramid subject (they are not many, those at least who have ventured to show their faith by public profession), the prevailing questions for several years past have been :—
What are the exact measures of the several parts of the ancient Great Pyramid, both internal and external?
Are the real and original fiducial points still existing to measure between? and
Are these fiducial points of a neat, refined, and exact nature?
Such questions, too, as these, it is absolutely necessary to have answered before safe conclusions can be formed as to the character and intentions of the ancient builders, and even before an appeal can be properly commenced for public aid in applying the most rigorous scientific measurement of modern times to the elucidation of the case.
Is it, in fact, mechanically worth while to apply accurate modern measure to the Great Pyramid? That is the main question just now. And the answer to it can hardly but be, from any one whose only knowledge is derived from the photozincographs and pages of the Ordnance pamphlet, and especially from the plate III., which should be the crucial test for all—"No, it is not worth while; in fact it would be folly to attempt it, because there is nothing finished, precise, or well defined about the building to which such accurate measure can be applied; there are only hideously rude, broken, and disjointed stones, as black as Nile mud and shaped like exaggerated pats thereof."
Yet, what is all the while the real fact?
That if you seek out, as any one in the position of the Ordnance Officers subsidized by Miss Burdett Coutts ought to have done, any still-existing traces of the once outside-finished surface of the Great Pyramid—you find admirably delicate joint-lines, like those well described by Colonel Howard Vyse in his two casing stones in situ, and as being scarcely perceptible or not wider than the thickness of silver paper. The workmanship of these stones, too, and of the Pyramid pavement about them, he has declared to be of almost infinite truth and exactness, and that there is every reason to believe that the whole exterior of the vast structure was covered originally with the same excellent masonry.
The chief part of what the incomparable Howard Vyse observed, was indeed soon afterwards entirely broken to pieces by mischievous visitors armed with large hammers, before any photographic testimonies became possible; but an approach to the same degree of accuracy of jointing may be remarked in my photographs of the northern end of the entrance passage into the Great Pyramid.
Thus in No. 17, mark, if you please, the greater density and finer constitution of the blocks as you approach the passage-surface. And then on that surface examine the masonry joints in both Nos. 18 and 19. There are some joints there, straight and true as the fiducial modern scales photographed by their sides, and under 1⁄3 th of an inch thick, although, too, these joints are mischievously enlarged by modern visitors trying almost daily whether they can or cannot insert the blades of their penknives into any part thereof. But on No. 18 I can, with the assistance of my measures detailed in Vol. 2 of Life and Work, point you to a place where there is one of the ancient joint-lines, happily not yet discovered by these modern visitors, and therefore so far in its original condition, and behold it is so fine that the photograph has not been able to render it. Yet at that place a line of 1⁄10 th of an inch broad would have been perceptible.
The casing-stones discovered by Colonel Howard Vyse were on so large a scale as to be near four feet high, eight feet broad at the base, and ten feet long; and yet he says of their jointings and worked surfaces, &c.—"The joints were scarcely perceptible, and not wider than the thickness of silver paper; and such is the tenacity of the cement with which they are held together that a fragment of one remained firmly fixed in its original alignment, notwithstanding the lapse of time and the violence to which it had been exposed. The pavement beyond the line of the building was well laid and beautifully finished; but beneath the edifice it was worked with even greater exactness, and to the most perfect level, in order, probably, to obtain a lasting foundation for the magnificent structure to be built upon it. I consider that the workmanship displayed in the King's chamber, in the pavement, and in the casing-stones, is perfectly unrivalled; and that there is no reason to doubt that the whole exterior of this vast structure was covered with the same excellent masonry."
Or, regard again the sides of the niche in the so-called Queen's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, represented in my photograph No. 22, by aid of magnesium light: see both the grandeur and mathematical beauty of the work—lines true as the 50-inch scales by the side of them, except where modern, and too often educated, men have come with their hammers and broken pieces off.
And thus fares with the Great Pyramid in the present day. Some men break away remnants of the fine and accurate work that had lived from 4,040 years ago up to their time; others ignore it, photograph rubbish instead, and imply that that wretched stuff is all the claim to scientific accuracy that the Pyramid possesses.
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