[Illustration: 006.jpg THE GREAT SPHINX OF GÎZEH PARTIALLY UNCOVERED,
AND THE PYRAMID OF KHEPHREN]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Émil Brugsch-Bey,
taken in the course of the excavations begun in 1886, with
the funds furnished by a public subscription opened by the
_Journal des Débats._

The brick mastabas were carefully cemented externally, and the layers
bound together internally by fine sand poured into the interstices.
Stone mastabas, on the contrary, present a regularity in the decoration
of their facings alone; in nine cases out of ten the core is built of
rough stone blocks, rudely cut into squares, cemented with gravel and
dried mud, or thrown together pell-mell without mortar of any kind. The
whole building should have been orientated according to rule, the four
sides to the four cardinal points, the greatest axis directed north and
south; but the masons seldom troubled themselves to find the true north,
and the orientation is usually incorrect.*

* Thus the axis of the tomb of Pirsenû is 17° east of the
magnetic north. In some cases the divergence is only 1° or
2°, more often it is 6°, 7°, 8°, or 9°, as can be easily
ascertained by consulting the work of Mariette.

The doors face east, sometimes north or south, but never west. One of
these is but the semblance of a door, a high narrow niche, contrived
so as to face east, and decorated with grooves framing a carefully
walled-up entrance; this was for the use of the dead, and it was
believed that the ghost entered or left it at will. The door for the