What we may be looking at here are the fingerprints of highly sophisticated and perhaps even technological people capable of awe-inspiring architectural and engineering feats at a time when no civilization of any kind is supposed to have existed anywhere on earth.

Supportive of this possibility is the fact that the megaliths of the temples demonstrate precisely the same apparent precipitation-induced weathering features as the Sphinx itself. And it is of interest to note that the surviving granite casing blocks seem to have been carved on their inner faces to fit over the limestone core-blocks at a time when these were already heavily marked by erosion. Since the granite casing has the look of other Old Kingdom Egyptian architecture (while the limestone core-blocks do not) this may be taken as further evidence of the theory that an ancient, revered and much-eroded structure was restored and renovated by the Old Kingdom Pharaohs. Robert Schoch certainly favours this view. 'I remain convinced,' comments the Boston University geology professor, 'that the backs of the Old Kingdom granite facing stones were carved to match or complement the earlier weathering features seen on the surfaces of the core limestone blocks of the temples.'[74]

Memorials mighty

The famous black diorite statue of Khafre that now stands in the Cairo Museum was found upside down in a twenty-foot deep pit in the floor of the antechamber that leads into the Valley Temple's T-shaped central hall. Walking through this hall, hemmed in by immensely strong and thick limestone and granite walls, the visitor will eventually come to a high, narrow pa.s.sageway on the north-western side of the structure. This pa.s.sage leads out of the rear of the temple, along the southern side of the Sphinx trench-where it overlooks the Sphinx-and thence joins with the ma.s.sive 'causeway' that runs for more than 1000 feet up the slope of the Giza plateau linking the Valley Temple to the Mortuary Temple and thence to the eastern face of the second Pyramid.

The causeways-one for each of the three Pyramids-are important features of the Giza necropolis, though all have fallen into an advanced state of disrepair. Some 20 feet wide, and varying in length from quarter of a mile up to half a mile, they each originally linked a Mortuary Temple to a Valley Temple. Today, however, the only relatively intact complex is that attributed to Khafre described above. In the case of the third Pyramid, the Valley Temple is now completely gone but the megalithic ruins of the Mortuary Temple are still in place. In the case of the Great Pyramid the only remaining part of the Mortuary Temple is its basalt floor, while the ruins of the Valley Temple-if any survive-are buried under the village of Nazlet-el-Sammam.

The three causeways, like the Mortuary and Valley Temples, are fashioned out of huge blocks of limestone. Indeed all of these prodigious structures are clearly 'of a piece' from a design point of view and seem to have been the work of builders who thought like G.o.ds or giants. There is about them an overwhelming, weary, aching sense of antiquity and it is certainly not hard to imagine that they might be the leavings of a lost civilization. In this regard we are reminded of The Sacred Sermon, a 'Hermetic' text of Egyptian origin that speaks with awe of lordly men 'devoted to the growth of wisdom' who lived 'before the Flood' and whose civilization was destroyed: 'And there shall be memorials mighty of their handiworks upon the earth, leaving dim trace behind when cycles are renewed ...'[75]

4. The artificial 'Horizon of Giza'.

There is another feature of the causeways, of intense interest to us, which we shall explore in detail in Parts III and IV-their orientation. The causeway of the Third Pyramid, like the gaze of the Sphinx, is targeted due east. The causeway of the second Pyramid points 14 degrees south of due east. The causeway of the Great Pyramid points 14 degrees north of due east. The arrangement is precise, geometrical, obviously deliberate, with each significant structure bearing a designed relationship to every other structure-and the whole contained within a large, circular artificial 'horizon' that is apparently centred on the apex of the second Pyramid with its rim lying just to the west of the rump of the Sphinx.

Orthodox Egyptological opinion concerning the causeways is that they were ceremonial roads. Notwithstanding the fact that they are technological masterpieces which could only have been built with an enormous expense of ingenuity and effort at the direction of skilled surveyors and architects, the a.s.sumption is that they were used just once for the funerary journey of the Pharaoh's corpse from Valley Temple to Mortuary Temple where his final embalming rituals took place.

Perhaps so. As we shall show in Parts III and IV, however, there are features of these causeways which suggest that they may have been used many times by many different Pharaohs and that they have their technical and symbolic origins in events that occurred long before the dawn of the historical civilization of Egypt.

Not purely symbolic boats

In the 1850s Sir Richard Francis Burton, the British explorer and adventurer, visited Egypt and the Pyramids of Giza. He noted some odd 'rhomboidal depressions' lying parallel to the eastern side of the Great Pyramid, close to the end of its causeway, and made sketches of them which are now kept in the British Museum.[76] Some years later, in 1881, Sir William Flinders Petrie, the 'Father of British Egyptology', also saw these strange depressions but simply referred to them as 'trenches' and did not bother to have them cleared.[77]

In 1893, buried in pits near a relatively obscure pyramid on another site, the famous French Egyptologist de Morgan discovered six large wooden boats, but little was made of this. In 1901 another French Egyptologist, Cha.s.sinat, discovered a 'rhomboidal pit' near the pyramid of Djedefra at Abu Roash. After noting that it very much resembled the pits at Giza near the Great Pyramid, he wrote: 'their purpose is unknown, as is the case here.'[78]

Ancient Egyptian funerary texts are strewn with references to boats-notably the various solar and divine vessels on which the deceased hoped to voyage in the cosmic afterlife (the 'boat of millions of years' for example, the 'bark of Osiris', and the 'bark of Ra'). Carvings, drawings and paintings of such 'boats' and 'barks', with their characteristic high prows and sterns, adorn the walls of many an ancient tomb in Egypt and their symbolic and religious functions were understood well before the close of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless it was only when the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt excavated an obvious and unmistakable boat made of bricks near the sun-temple and pyramids at Abusir, that it was recognized that the mysterious 'rhomboidal pits' were in fact boats-or at any rate representations of boats, or graves for boats.

Since Borchardt's time, several other boat pits have been found-by Selim Ha.s.san in 1933, for example, and by Walter Emery in 1937. Finally, in 1954, Kamal el-Mallakh discovered something quite breathtaking-a partially disa.s.sembled cedarwood boat, more than 143 feet long, buried in a pit on the south side of the Great Pyramid. Much more recently another vessel of similar dimensions has been located in an adjacent pit. As yet unexcavated, it is apparently to be studied by a j.a.panese consortium.

The fact that Egyptologists took a long time to notice that there were large boats buried at Giza does not necessarily mean that their a.n.a.lysis of the function of these boats is completely wrong. The idea is that the majestic vessels were intended in some 'primitive', 'magical', 'superst.i.tious', 'half-savage' way to serve as symbolic vehicles on which the souls of dead Pharaohs could sail into Heaven. This interpretation is consistent with the ancient Egyptian funerary texts and there can be little doubt that the boats-'solar boats' as the Egyptologists call them-were indeed intended to play a part in symbolic celestial journeys. As we shall see in Parts III and IV, however, it is possible that the precise nature and purpose of those journeys may have been much more complex and significant than has. .h.i.therto been recognized.

Meanwhile, standing in front of the 'solar boat' excavated from beside the south face of the Great Pyramid in 1954 it is hard not to note the marks of wear and tear on the keel and gangplank and the numerous other clear signs that this elegant cedarwood vessel, with its high curving prow and stern, was sailed many times on water.[79]

If it was purely symbolic, why was it used?

And why was it necessary to have such an elaborate and technically accomplished[80] craft for symbolic purposes? Wouldn't a symbolic vessel-such as the brick boats and boat 'graves' found at other Pyramids-have done just as well?

The Pyramids

The dominant features of the Giza necropolis are, of course, its three great Pyramids-those conventionally attributed to Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. In a sense they are what the entire, vast enterprise proclaims itself to be all about, what the causeways lead towards, what the 'solar boats' are buried beside. Sprawling diagonally across the meridian axis of the site, it is they, above all else, that the geometrical 'Horizon of Giza' appears to have been designed to circ.u.mscribe. Nothing about them is accidental: their original constructed heights, their angles of slope, the measurement of their perimeters, even the pattern in which they are carefully laid out on the ground-all of these things are purposive and laden with meaning.

Because we have described the Pyramids in such detail in other publications[81]-where we have also looked in depth into many of their technical and engineering puzzles-we will not trouble the reader with superfluous details here. Some basic statistics and a few points of a.n.a.lysis are, however, unavoidable at this stage.

The Great Pyramid was originally 481.3949 feet in height (now reduced to just a little over 450 feet) and its four sides each measure some 755 feet in length at the base. The second Pyramid was originally slightly lower-with a designed height of 471 feet-and has sides measuring just under 708 feet in length. The third Pyramid stands some 215 feet tall and has a side length at the base of 356 feet.

When they were built the second Pyramid and the Great Pyramid were both entirely covered in limestone facing blocks, several courses of which still adhere to the upper levels of the former. The Great Pyramid, by contrast, is today almost completely bereft of its casing. We know from historical accounts, however, that it was once clad from bottom to top with smoothly-polished Tura limestone which was shaken loose by a powerful earthquake that devastated the Cairo area in ad 1301. The newly exposed core masonry was then used for some years as a crude local quarry to rebuild the shattered mosques and palaces of Cairo.

All the Arab commentators prior to the fourteenth century tell us that the Great Pyramid's casing was a marvel of architecture that caused the edifice to glow brilliantly under the Egyptian sun. It consisted of an estimated 22 acres of 8-foot-thick blocks, each weighing in the region of 16 tons, 'so subtly jointed that one would have said that it was a single slab from top to bottom'.[82] A few surviving sections can still be seen today at the base of the monument. When they were studied in 1881 by Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie, he noted with astonishment that 'the mean thickness of the joints is 0.020 of an inch; and, therefore, the mean variation of the cutting of the stone from a straight line and from a true square is but 0.01 of an inch on a length of 75 inches up the face, an amount of accuracy equal to the most modern opticians' straight-edges of such a length.'

Another detail that Petrie found very difficult to explain was that the blocks had been carefully and precisely cemented together: 'To merely place such stones in exact contact at the sides would be careful work, but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible ...'[83]

Also 'almost impossible', since the mathematical value pi (3.14) is not supposed to have been calculated by any civilization until the Greeks stumbled upon it in the third century bc,[84] is the fact the designed height of the Great Pyramid-481.3949 feet-bears the same relationship to its base perimeter (3023.16 feet) as does the circ.u.mference of any circle to its radius. This relationship is 2pi (i.e. 481.3949 feet x 2 x 3.14 = 3023.16 feet).

Equally 'impossible'-at any rate for a people like the ancient Egyptians who are supposed to have known nothing about the true shape and size of our planet-is the relationship, in a scale of 1:43,200, that exists between the dimensions of the Pyramid and the dimensions of the earth. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether we are dealing with coincidence here, it is a simple fact, verifiable on any pocket calculator, that if you take the monument's original height (481.3949 feet) and multiply it by 43,200 you get a quotient of 3938.685 miles. This is an underestimate by just 11 miles of the true figure for the polar radius of the earth (3949 miles) worked out by the best modern methods. Likewise, if you take the monument's perimeter at the base (3023.16 feet) and multiply this figure by 43,200 then you get 24,734.94 miles-a result that is within 170 miles of the true equatorial circ.u.mference of the earth (24,902 miles). Moreover, although 170 miles sounds quite a lot, it amounts, in relation to the earth's total circ.u.mference, to a minus-error of only three quarters of a single per cent.

High precision

Such fine errors are within the general margins of tolerance found at the Great Pyramid. Indeed, although it has a footprint of over 13 acres, and consists of some six and a half million tons of limestone and granite blocks, the sheer ma.s.s and size of this monster of monuments are not its most impressive characteristics. More astounding by far is the incredible high-tech precision that is built into every aspect of its design.

Before going into the details, let us consider the implications of very fine precision in very large monuments.

An a.n.a.logy with the simple wrist-watch helps. If you are after an accuracy of, say, a few seconds per week, then an ordinary quartz watch costing fifty dollars or less will do the trick. If you want accuracy to within a fraction of a second per year, however, then the quartz watch will no longer serve and you will have to turn to something of the order of an atomic clock.

A similar situation applies in the construction industry. If you are building a brick wall that is to appear straight within plus or minus 1 degree per 100 metres and the whole roughly directed due north, then any good bricklayer should be able to meet your specification. However, if your requirement is for a wall that is straight within 1 arc minute per 100 metres and directed exactly due north, then you are going to need a laser theodolite, an ordnance survey map accurate to 10 metres, and a highly qualified team of professionals including an expert setting-out engineer, an astronomer, a surveyor, several master-masons and a week or so to ensure that the precision you are aiming for has in fact been achieved.

Such 'atomic clock' precision was achieved by the builders of the Great Pyramid more than 4500 years ago. This is not a matter of historical speculation, or of theory, but of plain, measurable facts.

For example the earth's equatorial circ.u.mference of 24,902 miles works out at around 132 million feet, with the result that a degree of lat.i.tude at the equator is equivalent to approximately 366,600 feet (i.e. 132 million feet divided by 360 degrees). Each degree is divided into 60 arc minutes, which means that 1 arc minute represents just over 6100 feet on the earth's surface, and each arc minute is then further subdivided into 60 arc seconds-with the result that 1 arc second is equivalent to a distance of about 101 feet. This system of measuring by degrees is not a modern convention but rather an inheritance of scientific thinking, connected to 'base 60' mathematics, that dates back to the remotest antiquity.[85] n.o.body knows where, or when, it originated.[86] It seems, however, to have been employed in the geodetic and astronomical calculations that were used to locate the Great Pyramid-for the monument is positioned barely a mile to the south of lat.i.tude 30, i.e. almost exactly one third of the way between the equator and the north pole.[87]

5. Geodetic location of the Great Pyramid of Giza on lat.i.tude 30 degrees north (one third of the way between the equator and the north pole) and at the centre of the world's habitable landma.s.ses.

It is unlikely that this choice of location could have come about by chance. Moreover, because no suitable site for such a ma.s.sive structure exists a mile or so to the north, it would be inadvisable to a.s.sume that the fractional offset from the thirtieth parallel could have been caused by a surveying error on the part of the Pyramid builders.

This offset amounts to 1 arc minute and 9 arc seconds-since the Pyramid's true lat.i.tude is 29 degrees 58' 51". Interestingly, however, as a former Astronomer Royal of Scotland has observed: 'If the original designer had wished that men should see with their bodily, rather than their mental eyes, the pole of the sky from the foot of the Great Pyramid, at an alt.i.tude before them of 30 degrees, he would have had to take account of the refraction of the atmosphere; and that would have necessitated the building standing not at lat.i.tude 30 degrees, but at lat.i.tude 29 degrees 58' 22".'[88]

In other words the monument turns out to be situated less than half an arc minute to the north of astronomical lat.i.tude 30 degrees, uncorrected for atmospheric refraction. Any 'error' involved is thus reduced to less than half of one-sixtieth of one degree-a hair's breadth in terms of the earth's circ.u.mference as a whole.

The same obsessive concern with accuracy is found in the orderly evenness of the Pyramid's base:[89]

Length of West side: 755 feet 9.1551 inches Length of North side: 755 feet 4.9818 inches Length of East side: 755 feet 10.4937 inches Length of South side: 756 feet 0.9739 inches The variation between the longest and shortest sides is therefore less than 8 inches-about one tenth of 1 per cent-quite an amazing feat when we consider that we are measuring a distance of over 9000 inches carpeted with thousands of huge limestone blocks weighing several tons each.

There is no sign that the ancient Pyramid builders were in any way daunted by the task of maintaining such fastidious standards of symmetry on such a grand scale. On the contrary, as though willingly seeking out additional technical challenges, they went on to equip the monument with corners set at almost perfect right-angles. The variation from 90 degrees is just 0 degrees 00' 02" at the north-west corner, 0 degrees 03' 02" at the north-east corner, 0 degrees 03' 33" at the south-east corner, and 0 degrees 00' 33" at the south-west corner.[90]

This, it must be conceded, is not just 'atomic clock' accuracy but the Rolex, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Rolls-Royce and IBM of building engineering all rolled into one.

And there is more.

It is fairly well known that the Pyramid was aligned by its architects to the cardinal points (with its north face directed north, its east face directed east, etc., etc.). Less well known is just how eerily exact is the precision of these alignments-with the average deviation from true being only a little over 3 arc minutes (i.e. about 5 per cent of a single degree).[91]

Why such meticulousness?

Why such rigour?

Why should even the most megalomaniacal of Pharaohs have cared whether his ma.s.sive 'tomb' was aligned within 3 arc minutes of true north-or indeed within a whole degree of true north? To the naked-eye observer it is virtually impossible to determine such a deviation. Indeed most of us could not spot a misalignment within 3 whole degrees (180 arc minutes), let alone within 3 arc minutes (and some people have trouble telling the general direction of north at all). So the question has to be asked: what was all this incredible precision for? Why did the builders burden themselves with so much extra work and difficulty when the effects of their additional labours would not be visible to the naked eye anyway?

They must, one a.s.sumes, have had a powerful motive to create what is truly a miracle of the surveyor's art.

And what makes this miracle all the more remarkable is the fact that it was not performed on a perfectly flat area of ground, as one might expect, but with a ma.s.sive natural mound, or hill, left exactly in the middle of the site on which the Great Pyramid was being erected. Estimated to be almost 30 feet high-as tall as a two-storey house-and positioned dead centre over the base area (of which it occupies approximately 70 per cent), this primeval mound was skilfully incorporated into the lower courses of the growing edifice. No doubt its presence has contributed down the epochs to the structure's legendary stability. It is extremely difficult, however, to understand how the ancient surveyors were able to square the base of the Pyramid in its early and most important stages with the mound so solidly in the way (squaring the base normally involves taking repeated diagonal measurements across the corners).[92] All that we can say for sure is that the base is square and that the monument is locked into the cardinal axes of our planet with great care and precision.

6. Cross-section of the Great Pyramid of Egypt showing the natural mound of bedrock that is known to be built into its lower courses.

7. Internal corridors and pa.s.sageways of the three Pyramids of Giza.

Chambers and pa.s.sageways

The second and third Pyramids have relatively simple internal chambers and pa.s.sageway systems-the former having one princ.i.p.al chamber just below ground level, positioned centrally under the apex of the monument, the latter having three main chambers, cut a little more deeply into the bedrock but again positioned centrally under the apex of the monument. The entrances to both Pyramids are in their north faces and take the form of cramped pa.s.sageways sloping downwards at an angle of 26 degrees, before levelling off to join horizontal corridors under the monument.

The internal structure of the Great Pyramid, by contrast, is much more complex, with an elaborate arrangement of pa.s.sageways and galleries-sloping up and down again at 26 degrees-and with three princ.i.p.al internal chambers. Of these latter only one, the 'Subterranean Chamber', is below ground level. The other two-the so-called 'Queen's Chamber' and 'King's Chamber'-are both located in the heart of the monument's superstructure at substantial alt.i.tudes above the ground.

The layout of these internal features is best appreciated from the diagram printed on page 45. Chief amongst them, surmounted only by Davison's Chamber (and above that by the four so-called 'relieving chambers' which contain the 'quarry marks' mentioned earlier) is the-rectangular red-granite room, now famous as the 'King's Chamber'. It proved to be completely devoid of either treasures or inscriptions, or the body of a king, when it was first entered by Calif Al Mamoun in the ninth century ad. Measuring 34 feet 4 inches in length, 17 feet 2 inches in width, and 19 feet 1 inch in height it is located about 150 feet vertically above the base of the Pyramid. Its many mysteries are too well known to require further elucidation here (and, besides, have been described in some detail in our earlier publications[93]).

8. Princ.i.p.al internal features of the Great Pyramid. The entrance in the north face known as 'Mamoun's Hole' was forced by Arab explorers in the ninth century ad. At this time the exterior facing blocks of the Pyramid were still intact, hiding the true entrance from sight.

Connecting the King's Chamber to the lower levels of the monument is the Grand Gallery, one of 'the most celebrated architectural works which have survived from the Old Kingdom'.[94] Sloping downwards at an angle of 26 degrees, it is an astonishing corbel-vaulted hall fully 153 feet in length and 7 feet in width at floor level. Its lofty ceiling, 28 feet above the visitor's head, is just visible in the electric lighting with which the Pyramid has been equipped in modern times.

At the base of the Grand Gallery a horizontal pa.s.sage, 3 feet 9 inches high and 127 feet long, runs due south into the 'Queen's Chamber'. Again found empty by Mamoun, this is a smaller room than the King's Chamber, measuring 18 feet 10 inches from east to west and 17 feet 2 inches from north to south. Reaching a height of 20 feet 5 inches, the ceiling is gabled (whereas it is flat in the King's Chamber) and there is a large corbelled niche of unknown function just south of the centre line in the east wall.

9. Detail of the corridors, chambers and shafts of the Great Pyramid.

Returning along the horizontal pa.s.sageway to its junction with the base of the Grand Gallery the visitor will note, behind a modern iron grille, the narrow and uninviting mouth of the 'Well-Shaft'-a near vertical tunnel, often less than 3 feet in diameter, that eventually joins up with the Descending Corridor, almost 100 feet below ground level. How the tunnelers, encysted in solid rock, were able to home in so accurately on their target remains a mystery. Mysterious, too, is the true function of all these odd systems of interconnecting 'ducts' which lead busily hither and thither inside the body of the monument, like the circuits of some great machine.

Sloping downwards from the Grand Gallery, and extending it in the direction of the ground at the continuing angle of 26 degrees, is another corridor. Known (from the point of view of those entering the Pyramid) as the Ascending Corridor, it measures 3 feet 11 inches high by 3 feet 5 inches wide and has a total length of just under 129 feet. Leaving the Pyramid, the visitor is obliged to ape-walk uncomfortably down the Ascending Corridor until the point where it joins up with 'Mamoun's Hole'-the tunnel that the Arabs cut for their forced entry in the ninth century-on the western side of two hulking red-granite 'plugging blocks' which mask the junction with the Descending Corridor. At the bottom of this 350-foot-long corridor, off limits to all but bona fide Egyptologists (and those willing to bribe the increasingly hard-pressed and demoralized Inspectors and ghafirs responsible for the day-to-day administration of Giza) is a truly remarkable feature-the Subterranean Chamber that nestles in solid bedrock more than 100 feet below the surface of the plateau (and almost 600 feet below the Pyramid's lofty summit platform).

Inner s.p.a.ce

The first thing that the intrepid visitor should do, after gaining access to the Descending Corridor, is to climb up it a few feet in the direction of the Pyramid's true entrance. Now covered with an iron grille, this entrance is located in the monument's north face, nine courses above and 24 feet to the east of 'Mamoun's Hole' (through which all members of the public enter the Pyramid today).

Here, at the point in the ceiling of the Descending Corridor where the mouth of the Ascending Corridor was hewn upwards, it is possible to inspect the bottom end of the lowermost of the two plugging blocks. It is as firmly jammed in place today as it was when Mamoun's diggers first encountered it in the ninth century, and it is easy to understand why its presence there encouraged them to tunnel round it into the softer limestone, seeking a way past the obstacle and into the upper reaches of whatever lay beyond.

Perhaps this was exactly what the Pyramid builders had 'programmed' those early explorers to do. After all, if you see that a huge chunk of granite has been hauled into place to block what is obviously an upwards-sloping corridor, then it is only human nature to try to get into that corridor-which Mamoun's men did.

More than a thousand years later, tourists and archaeologists still follow the trail that those pioneering Arabs blazed around the plugging blocks into the main north-south axis of the Pyramid's system of pa.s.sageways. And though there have been all manner of hackings and tunnellings in search of further pa.s.sageways (in the floors and walls of the King's and Queen's Chambers, for example), the plugs at the base of the Ascending Corridor have never subsequently been disturbed.

This is an understandable oversight if one is satisfied that the sole function of these plugs was to block the Ascending Corridor in a north-south direction. Why, however, has no one ever tried to find out if anything lies behind their eastern aspect?[95] As well as having the same height and width as the Ascending Corridor, thus filling it completely, each of the plugs is about four feet in length-and thus easily long enough to conceal the entrance to a second and completely separate pa.s.sageway system branching off at right angles towards the east.

There is certainly room for such a second system inside the Great Pyramid-and for much else besides. Indeed it has been calculated that as many as 3700 fully constructed chambers, each the size of the existing King's Chamber could be accommodated within the monument's vast 'inner s.p.a.ce' of 8.5 million cubic feet.[96]

The stones of darkness and the shadow of death

Having examined the plugging blocks, the visitor is faced by a long climb down the full 350-foot length of the Descending Corridor, initially through masonry and thence into bedrock. As the journey proceeds, the rays of sunlight penetrating the barred entrance to the north grow progressively weaker and one has the sense of dropping like a deep-sea diver into the dark depths of a midnight-black ocean.

The corridor, which every intuition proclaims to be a remotely ancient, prehistoric feature, is 3 feet 11 inches high by 3 feet 6 inches wide and may originally have been cut into the 30-foot-tall rocky mound that occupied this site millennia before the Pyramid was built. It is unsettling, therefore, to discover that it is machine-age straight from top to bottom. According to Flinders Petrie, the variation along the whole pa.s.sage 'is under 1/4 inch in the sides and 3/10 inch on the roof'.[97] In addition there is one segment of the corridor, 150 feet in length, where 'the average error of straightness is only one fiftieth of an inch, an amazingly minute amount.'[98]

With hunched back, the visitor continues down this long, straight corridor sloping due south into the bedrock of the Giza plateau at the now familiar angle of 26 degrees. As ever greater depths are plumbed it is hard not to grow increasingly conscious of the tremendous ma.s.s of limestone that is piled above and of the heavy, dusty, unfresh fug of the subterranean air-like the exhalation of some cyclopean beast. Looking back apprehensively towards the entrance, one notices that the penetrating light has been reduced to a glimmering star-burst, high up and far away. And it is normal, at this point, to feel a concomitant glimmer of apprehension, a slight tug of anxiety at the extent of one's separation from the world above.

10. The complex internal design of the Great Pyramid. It is possible that many other pa.s.sageways and chambers remain to be discovered within the gigantic monument.

On the west side of the corridor, quite near the bottom, is an alcove, again covered by an iron grille, that gives access to the vertical Well-Shaft and thence to the Grand Gallery and the upper chambers. Soon afterwards the 20-degree descending slope levels off into a low horizontal pa.s.sageway, running 29 feet from north to south, through which the visitor is obliged to crawl on all fours. Near the end of this pa.s.sageway, again on the west side, is another alcove, 6 feet long and 3 feet deep, that has been roughly hewn out of the bedrock and that ends in a blind, unfinished wall. Then, after a further 4 feet of crawling, the horizontal pa.s.sageway opens at a height of about 2 feet above floor level into the Subterranean Chamber.

Were it not for a single low-wattage electric bulb installed in modern times, the visitor would now be in complete darkness. The light that the bulb casts has a greenish, sepulchral hue, and what it reveals is a most peculiar room, considerably larger than the King's Chamber, measuring 46 feet along its east-west axis, and 27 feet 1 inch from north to south, but with a maximum height of just 11 feet 6 inches.[99] In the approximate centre of the floor, on the east side, is a railing surrounding a square pit reaching a depth of about 10 feet, and beyond that, penetrating the south wall, is a second horizontal corridor, 2 feet 4 inches square, running due south into the bedrock for a further 53 feet and terminating in a blank wall. Looking to the right, one notes that the floor of the western side of the Chamber rises up into a kind of chest-high platform. This has been irregularly trenched, creating four parallel 'fins' of limestone running east to west, almost touching the relatively flat roof at some points but with a clearance of up to six feet in others.

All these strange features conspire to create an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere in the room that reminds the visitor of how far beneath the ground he has burrowed, and of how inescapably he could be entombed here if there were to be any serious collapse of the millions of tons of limestone above his head.

Very interesting developments

Egyptological opinion concerning the Subterranean Chamber may be summarized as follows: (1) it is not a prehistoric feature, but was built at the same time as the Pyramid (i.e. around 2500 bc); (2) it was initially intended to be the burial place of Khufu; (3) then the Pharaoh and his architects changed their minds, stopped work on it, and turned their attentions to the main body of the Pyramid-where they built first the Queen's Chamber (also later 'abandoned' according to this theory) and then finally the King's Chamber.[100]

If the Egyptologists are right then the excavation and removal of more than 2000 tons of solid rock in order to create the Descending Corridor-rock that first had to be mined and then hauled to the surface from increasingly greater depths through that cramped, unventilated, 26-degree channel-would all have been undertaken in vain. Vain, too, would have been the hewing out of the Subterranean Chamber itself, and also of its further shafts and pits. Indeed the whole enterprise would, in retrospect, have been entirely pointless if the end result had merely been to leave, at a depth of more than 100 feet below the Giza plateau, an unfinished, rough-walled, low-ceilinged crypt-'resembling a quarry'[101]-for which n.o.body would ever have any use.

This obviously defies common sense. An alternative scenario does exist, however, which has stimulated the curiosity of a number of investigators during the last two centuries. According to this scenario the Chamber was deliberately left unfinished so as to hoodwink treasure hunters into believing that it had been abandoned and thus convince them of the pointlessness of further explorations there-a pretty effective means of keeping casual intruders away from any other cavities or concealed pa.s.sageways that might be connected to it.

With such suspicions in mind, the Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Caviglia and the British adventurer Colonel Howard Vyse both felt inspired (between 1830 and 1837) to drill holes into the bottom of the pit at the centre of the Subterranean Chamber. They extended its original depth of 10 feet by a further 35 feet (now largely filled in).

More recently the French archaeologist, Andre Pochan, has drawn attention to a curious pa.s.sage from the Greek historian Herodotus who visited Egypt in the fifth century bc and spent much time interviewing priests and other learned men there. Herodotus reports that he was told quite specifically of the existence of 'underground chambers on the hill on which the Pyramids stand ... These chambers King Cheops [Khufu] made as burial chambers for himself in a kind of island, bringing in a channel from the Nile ....'[102]

Pochan has calculated that if there really is a chamber fed by Nile water under the Pyramid, then it would have to be at a great depth-at least 90 feet below the pit. Likewise the Danish architect Hubert Paulsen has argued on the basis of geometry that the most probable place for any further chamber to be found in the Great Pyramid is underneath the pit[103]-a view that is also supported by the calculations of the British geometer Robin Cook.[104]