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Another authority felt that the careful and clever design of this strange
pyramid boat could potentially have made it ‘a far more seaworthy craft
than anything available to Columbus’.7 Moreover, the experts agreed that
it had been built to a pattern that could only have been ‘created by
shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the
open sea.’8
Present at the very beginning of Egypt’s 3000-year history, who had
those as yet unidentified shipbuilders been? They had not accumulated
their ‘long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea’ while ploughing the
fields of the landlocked Nile Valley. So where and when had they
developed their maritime skills?
There was yet another puzzle. I knew that the Ancient Egyptians had
been very good at making scale models and representations of all
manner of things for symbolic purposes.9 I therefore found it hard to
understand why they would have gone to the trouble of manufacturing
and then burying a boat as big and sophisticated as this if its only
function, as the Egyptologists claimed, had been as a token of the
spiritual vessel that would carry the soul of the deceased king to
heaven.10 That could have been achieved as effectively with a much
smaller craft, and only one would have been needed, not several. Logic
therefore suggested that these gigantic vessels might have been intended
for some other purpose altogether, or had some quite different and still
unsuspected symbolic significance ...
We had reached the rough midpoint of the southern face of the Great
Pyramid when we at last realized why we were being taken on this long
walkabout. The objective was for us to be relieved of moderate sums of
money at each of the four cardinal points. The tally thus far was 30 US
dollars at the northern face and 50 Egyptian pounds at the eastern face.
Now I shelled out a further 50 Egyptian pounds to yet another patrol Ali
was supposed to have paid off the day before.
‘Ali,’ I hissed, ‘when are we going to climb the Pyramid?’
‘Right away, Mr. Graham,’ our guide replied. He walked confidently
forward, gesturing directly ahead, then added, ‘We shall ascend at the
south-west corner ...’
7 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 132-3.
8 The Ra Expeditions, p. 16.
9 See, for example, Christine Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen, Penguin Books,
London, 1989, pages 89, 108, 113, 283.
10 A.J. Spencer, The Great Pyramid Fact Sheet, P.J. Publications, 1989.
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Chapter 34
Mansion of Eternity
Have you ever climbed a pyramid, at night, fearful of arrest, with your
nerves in shreds?
It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to do, especially where the Great
Pyramid is concerned. Even though its top 31 feet are no longer intact, its
presently exposed summit platform still stands more than 450 feet above
ground level.1 It consists, moreover, of 203 separate courses of masonry,
with the average course height being about two and a quarter feet.2
Averages do not tell you everything, as I discovered soon after we
began the climb. The courses turned out to be of unequal depth, some
barely reaching knee level while others came up almost to my chest and
created formidable obstacles. At the same time the horizontal ledges
between each of the steps were very narrow, often only a little wider than
my foot, and many of the big limestone blocks, which had looked so solid
from below, proved to be crumbling and broken.
Somewhere around 30 courses up Santha and I began to appreciate
what we had let ourselves in for. Our muscles were aching and our knees
and fingers stiff and bruised—yet we were barely one-seventh of the way
to the summit and there were still more than 170 courses to climb.
Another worry was the vertiginous drop steadily opening beneath us.
Looking down along the ruptured contours that marked the line of the
southwestern corner, I was taken aback to see how far we had already
easy it would be for us to fall, head over heels like Jack and Jill, bouncing
and jolting over the huge layers of stone, breaking our crowns at the
bottom.
Ali had permitted a pause of a few moments for us to catch our
breaths, but now he signalled that we should press on and began to
climb again. Still using the corner as a guideline, he rapidly disappeared
into the darkness above.
Somewhat less confidently, Santha and I followed.
Time and motion
The 35th course of masonry was a hard one to clamber over, being made
of particularly massive blocks, much larger than any of the others we had
1 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 8.
2 Peter Lemesurier, The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, Element Books,
Shaftesbury, 1987, p. 225.
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so far encountered (except those at the very base) and estimated to
weigh between 10 and 15 tons apiece.3 This contradicted engineering
logic and commonsense, both of which called for a progressive decrease
in the size and weight of the blocks that had to be transported to the
summit as the pyramid rose ever higher. Courses 1-18, which diminished
from a height of about 55.5 inches at ground level to just over 23 inches
at course 17, did obey this rule. Then suddenly, at course 19, the block
height rose again to almost 36 inches. At the same time the other
dimensions of the blocks also increased and their weight grew from the
relatively manoeuvrable range of 2-6 tons that was common in the first
18 courses to the more ponderous and cumbersome range of 10-15
tons.4 These, therefore, were really big monoliths that had been carved
out of solid limestone and raised more than 100 feet into the air before
being placed faultlessly in position.
To have worked effectively the pyramid builders must have had nerves
of steel, the agility of mountain goats, the strength of lions and the
confidence of trained steeplejacks. With the cold morning wind whipping
around my ears and threatening to launch me into flight, I tried to
imagine what it must have been like for them, poised dangerously at this
(and much higher) altitudes, lifting, manoeuvring and positioning exactly
an endless production line of chunky limestone monoliths—the smallest
of which weighed as much as two modern family cars.
How long had the pyramid taken to complete? How many men had
worked on it? The consensus among Egyptologists was two decades and
100,000 men.5 It was also generally agreed that the construction project
had not been a year-round affair but had been confined (through labour
force availability) to the annual three-month agricultural lay-off season
imposed by the flooding of the Nile.6
As I continued to climb, I reminded myself of the implications of all
this. It wasn’t just the tens of thousands
of blocks weighing 15 tons or
more that the builders would have had to worry about. Year in, year out,
the real crises would have been caused by the millions of ‘average-sized’
blocks, weighing say 2.5 tons, that also had to be brought to the working
plane. The Pyramid has been reliably estimated to consist of a total of 2.3
million blocks.7 Assuming that the masons worked ten hours a day, 365
days a year, the mathematics indicate that they would have needed to
place 31 blocks in position every hour (about one block every two
minutes) to complete the Pyramid in twenty years. Assuming that
construction work had been confined to the annual three-month lay-off,
3 Dr. Joseph Davidovits and Margie Morris, The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, Dorset
Press, New York, 1988, pp. 39-40.
4 Ibid., p. 37.
5 John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Time-Life Books, Virginia, 1990,
p. 160; The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 229-30.
6 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 229.
7 Ibid., p. 85.
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the problems multiplied: four blocks a minute would have had to be
delivered, about 240 every hour.
Such scenarios are, of course, the stuff construction managers’
nightmares are made of. Imagine, for example, the daunting degree of
coordination that must have been maintained between the masons and
the quarries to ensure the requisite rate of block flow across the
production site. Imagine also the havoc if even a single 2.5 ton block had
been dropped from, say, the 175th course.
The physical and managerial obstacles seemed staggering on their own,
but beyond these was the geometrical challenge represented by the
pyramid itself, which had to end up with its apex positioned exactly over
the centre of its base. Even the minutest error in the angle of incline of
any one of the sides at the base would have led to a substantial
misalignment of the edges at the apex. Incredible accuracy, therefore,
had to be maintained throughout, at every course, hundreds of feet
above the ground, with great stone blocks of killing weight.
Rampant stupidity
How had the job been done?
At the last count there were more than thirty competing and conflicting
theories attempting to answer that question. The majority of academic
Egyptologists have argued that ramps of one kind or another must have
been used. This was the opinion, for example, of Professor I.E.S Edwards,
a former keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum who
asserted categorically: ‘Only one method of lifting heavy weights was
open to the ancient Egyptians, namely by means of ramps composed of
brick and earth which sloped upwards from the level of the ground to
whatever height was desired.’8
John Baines, professor of Egyptology at Oxford University, agreed with
Edwards’s analysis and took it further: ‘As the pyramid grew in height,
the length of the ramp and the width of its base were increased in order
to maintain a constant gradient (about 1 in 10) and to prevent the ramp
from collapsing. Several ramps approaching the pyramid from different
sides were probably used.’9
To carry an inclined plane to the top of the Great Pyramid at a gradient
of 1:10 would have required a ramp 4800 feet long and more than three
times as massive as the Great Pyramid itself (with an estimated volume of
8 million cubic metres as against the Pyramid’s 2.6 million cubic
metres).10 Heavy weights could not have been dragged up any gradient
8 Ibid., p. 220.
9 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 139.
10 Peter Hodges and Julian Keable, How the Pyramids Were Built, Element Books,
Shaftesbury, 1989, p. 123.
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steeper than this by any normal means.11 If a lesser gradient had been
chosen, the ramp would have had to be even more absurdly and
disproportionately massive.
The problem was that mile-long ramps reaching a height of 480 feet
could not have been made out of ‘bricks and earth’ as Edwards and other
Egyptologists supposed. On the contrary, modern builders and architects
had proved that such ramps would have caved in under their own weight
if they had consisted of any material less costly and less stable than the
limestone ashlars of the Pyramid itself.12
Since this obviously made no sense (besides, where had the 8 million
cubic metres of surplus blocks been taken after completion of the work?),
other Egyptologists had proposed the use of spiral ramps made of mud
brick and attached to the sides of the Pyramid. These would certainly
have required less material to build, but they would also have failed to
reach the top.13 They would have presented deadly and perhaps
insurmountable problems to the teams of men attempting to drag the big
blocks of stone around their hairpin corners. And they would have
crumbled under constant use. Most problematic of all, such ramps would
have cloaked the whole pyramid, thus making it impossible for the
architects to check the accuracy of the setting-out during building.14
But the pyramid builders had checked the accuracy of the setting out,
and they had got it right, because the apex of the pyramid was poised
exactly over the centre of the base, its angles and its corners were true,
each block was in the correct place, and each course had been laid down
level—in near-perfect symmetry and with near-perfect alignment to the
cardinal points. Then, as though to demonstrate that such tours-de-force
of technique were mere trifles, the ancient master-builders had gone on
to play some clever mathematical games with the monument’s
dimensions, presenting us, for example, as we saw in Chapter Twentythree, with an accurate use of the transcendental number pi in the ratio
of its height to its base perimeter.15 For some reason, too, it had taken
their fancy to place the Great Pyramid almost exactly on the 30th parallel
at latitude 29° 58’ 51”. This, as a former astronomer royal of Scotland
once observed, was ‘a sensible defalcation from 30°’, but not necessarily
in error:
For if the original designer had wished that men should see with their body, rather
than their mental eyes, the pole of the sky from the foot of the Great Pyramid, at
an altitude before them of 30°, he would have had to take account of the refraction
of the atmosphere; and that would have necessitated the building standing not at
11 Ibid., p. 11.
12 Ibid., p. 13.
13 Ibid., p. 125-6. Failure to reach the top would be because spiral ramps and linked
scaffolds overlap and exceed the space available long before arrival at the summit.
14 Ibid., p. 126.
15 See Chapter Twenty-three; The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 219; Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p.
139.
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30° but at 29° 58’ 22”.16
Compared to the true position of 29° 58’ 51”, this was an error of less
than half an arc minute, suggesting once again that the surveying
and
geodetic skills brought to bear here must have been of the highest order.
Feeling somewhat overawed, we climbed on, past the 44th and 45th
courses of the hulking and enigmatic structure. At the 40th course an
angry voice hailed us in Arabic from the plaza below and we looked down
to see a tiny, turbaned man dressed in a billowing kaftan. Despite the
range, he had unslung his shotgun and was preparing to take aim at us.
The guardian and the vision
He was, of course, the guardian of the Pyramid’s western face, the
patrolman of the fourth cardinal point, and he had not received the extra
funds dispensed to his colleagues of the north, east and south faces.
I could tell from Ali’s perspiration that we were in a potentially tricky
situation. The guard was ordering us to come down at once so that he
could place us under arrest. ‘This, however, could probably be avoided
with a further payment,’ Ali explained.
I groaned. ‘Offer him 100 Egyptian pounds.’
‘Too much,’ Ali cautioned, ‘it will make the others resentful. I shall offer
him 50.’
More words were exchanged in Arabic. Indeed, over the next few
minutes, Ali and the guard managed to have quite a sustained
conversation up and down the south-western corner of the Pyramid at
4:40 in the morning. At one point a whistle was blown. Then the guards
of the southern face put in a brief appearance and stood in conference
with the guard of the western face, who had now also been joined by the
two other members of his patrol.
Just when it seemed that Ali had lost whatever argument he was having
on our behalf, he smiled and heaved a sigh of relief. ‘You will pay the
extra 50 pounds when we have returned to the ground,’ he explained.
‘They’re letting us continue but they say that if any senior officer comes
along and sees us they will not be able to help us.’
We struggled upwards in silence for the next ten minutes or so until we
had reached the tooth course—roughly the halfway mark and already well
over 250 feet above the ground. We gazed over our shoulders to the
southwest, where a once-in-a-lifetime vision of staggering beauty and
power confronted us. The crescent moon, which hung low in the sky to
the south-east, had emerged from behind a scudding cloud bank and
projected its ghostly radiance directly at the northern and eastern faces