Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/463

Rh gallery floor. It comes out 36° 10'. Now at the winter solstice the sun was 30° + 24° from the zenith or 54°, that is, 36° from the horizon, the angle just found. In midwinter then the sun shone just to the bottom of the effective gallery, as at mid-summer it had marked its top. Between these two extremes the shadow must always fall. Thus the gallery's floor exactly included every possible position of the sun's shadow at noon from the year's beginning to its end. We thus reach this remarkable result that the gallery was a gigantic gnomon or sundial telling, not like ordinary sun-dials the hour of the day, but on a more impressive scale, the seasons of the year.

That the gallery itself extends below the point where the central incline drops vertically to permit of entrance to the Queen's Tomb with its ramps notched, as above, does not vitiate the deduction, for observers could not generally be placed on benches with their legs hanging down, however they might be so located on emergency. The recognition of this function of the gallery is not new, being, I believe, due to Proctor, but the exact coincidence of the limits of the effective gallery with those of the sun has, to my knowledge, never been pointed out.

Such, then, was the use of the entering passage, and such the design of the Great Gallery. Grand as was communion there with the sky by day, it must have been sublime at night—alone with the stars in the heart of that superb monument of stone. About the year 3430 it was further heightened by a spectacle which could not be witnessed now. Calculation shows that the great star α Centauri, the brightest and nearest to us of all the fixed stars, shone then at its upper culmination night after night down the hushed and polished vault of the Great Gallery.

α Centauri now hardly peeps above the pyramid's horizon at its highest, and in a few more years will never rise there at all until, thousands of years hence, the pole in its majestic precessional march raises it into view once more.

In a peculiar sense the pyramid was the man for whose use it was built. Primarily its purpose was to cast his horoscope through life, and then when his days were ended it became his tomb. He was