The moving finger writes and having writ it moves on
Leaving the underground chambers, which seemed to vibrate at the core
of the Third Pyramid like the convoluted, multi-valved heart of some
slumbering Leviathan, we made our way along the narrow entrance
corridor and into the open air.
Our objective now was the Second Pyramid. We walked along its
western flank (just under 708 feet in length), turned right and eventually
came to the point on its north side, about 40 feet east of the main northsouth axis, where the principal entrances were located. One of these was
carved directly into the bedrock at ground level about 30 feet in front of
the monument; the other was cut into the northern face at a height of
just under 50 feet. From the latter a corridor sloped downwards at an
angle of 25° 55’.10 From the former, by which we now entered the
pyramid, another descending corridor led deeply underground then
levelled off for a short distance, giving access to a subterranean chamber,
then ascended steeply and finally levelled off again into a long horizontal
passageway, heading due south (into which also fed the upper corridor
that sloped down from the entrance in the north face).
High enough to stand up in, and lined at first with granite and then with
smoothly polished limestone, the horizontal passageway was almost at
ground level, that is, it lay directly beneath the pyramid’s lowest course
of masonry. It was also extremely long, running dead straight for a
further 200 feet until it debouched in the single ‘burial chamber’ at the
heart of the monument.
As we have already noted, no mummy had ever been found in this latter
chamber, nor any inscriptions, with the result that the so-called Pyramid
of Khafre was wholly anonymous. Latter-day adventurers had, however,
carved their names on to its walls—notably the former circus strongman
Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778-1823) who had forced his way into the
9 See, for example, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 180.
10 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 117.
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monument in 1818. His huge and flamboyant graffito, daubed in black
paint high on the south side of the chamber, was a reminder of basic
human nature: the desire that all of us feel to be recognized and
remembered. It was clear that Khafre himself had been far from immune
from this ambition, since repeated references to him (as well as a number
of flattering statues) appeared in the surrounding funerary complex.11 If
he had indeed built the pyramid as his tomb, it seemed inconceivable
that such a man would have failed to stamp his name and identity
somewhere within its interior. I found myself wondering yet again why
Egyptologists were so unwilling to consider the possibility that the
funerary complex might have been Khafre’s work and the pyramid
someone else’s?
But who else’s?
11 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 123.
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Above Chamber and passageway system of the Pyramid of Menkaure.
Below Chamber and passageway system of the Pyramid of Khafre.
In many ways this—rather than the absence of identifying marks—was
the central problem. Prior to the reigns of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure
there was not a single pharaoh whose name could be put forward as a
candidate. Khufu’s father Sneferu, the first king of the Fourth Dynasty,
was believed to have built the so-called ‘Bent’ and ‘Red’ Pyramids at
Dahshur, about thirty miles south of Giza—an attribution that was itself
mysterious (if pyramids were indeed tombs) since it seemed strange that
one pharaoh required two pyramids to be buried in. Sneferu was also
credited by some Egyptologists with the construction of the ‘Collapsed’
Pyramid at Meidum (although a number of authorities insisted that this
was the tomb of Huni, the last king of the Third Dynasty).12 The only other
12 The Riddle of the Pyramids, p. 49.
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builders in the Archaic Period had been Zoser, the second pharaoh of the
Third Dynasty, to whom was attributed the construction of the ‘Step
Pyramid’ at Saqqara,13 and Zoser’s successor, Sekhemkhet, whose
pyramid also stood at Saqqara. Therefore, despite the lack of inscriptions,
it was now assumed as obvious that the three pyramids at Giza must have
been built by Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure and must have been intended
to serve as their tombs.
We need not reiterate here the many shortcomings of the ‘tombs and
tombs only’ theory. However, these shortcomings were not limited to the
Giza pyramids but applied to all the other Third and Fourth Dynasty
Pyramids listed above. Not a single one of these monuments had ever
been found to contain the body of a pharaoh, or any signs whatsoever of
a royal burial.14 Some of them were not even equipped with sarcophagi,
for example the Collapsed Pyramid at Meidum. The Pyramid of
Sekhemkhet at Saqqara (first entered in 1954 by the Egyptian Antiquities
Organization) did contain a sarcophagus—one, which had certainly
remained sealed and undisturbed since its installation in the ‘tomb’.15
Grave robbers had never succeeded in finding their way to it, but when it
was opened, it was empty.16
So what was going on? How come more than twenty-five million tons of
stone had been piled up to form pyramids at Giza, Dahshur, Meidum and
Saqqara if the only point of the exercise had been to install empty
sarcophagi in empty chambers? Even admitting the hypothetical excesses
of one or two megalomaniacs, it seemed unlikely that a whole succession
of pharaohs would have sanctioned such wastefulness.
Pandora’s Box
Buried beneath the five million tons of the Second Pyramid at Giza,
Santha and I now stepped into the monument’s spacious inner chamber,
which might have been a tomb but might equally have served some other
as yet unidentified purpose. Measuring 46.5 feet in length from east to
west, and 16.5 in breadth from north to south, this naked and sterile
apartment was topped off with an immensely strong gabled ceiling
reaching a height of 22.5 feet at its apex. The gable slabs, each a
massive 20-ton limestone monolith, had been laid in position at an angle
of 53° 7’ 28” (which exactly matched the angle of slope of the pyramid’s
sides).17 Here there were no relieving chambers (as there were above the
King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid). Instead, for more than 4000
13 Ibid., pp. 36-9.
14 Ibid., p. 74.
15 Ibid., p. 42.
16 Ibid.
17 The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 123; The Pyramids Of Egypt, p. 118.
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years—perhaps far more—the gabled ceiling had taken the immense
weight of the second largest stone building in the world.
I looked slowly around the room, which reflected a yellowish-white
radiance back at me. Quarried di
rectly out of the living bedrock, its walls
were not at all smoothly finished, as one might have expected, but were
noticeably rough and irregular. The floor too was peculiar: of split-level
design with a step about a foot deep separating its eastern and western
halves. The supposed sarcophagus of Khafre lay near the western wall,
embedded in the floor. Measuring just over six feet in length, quite
shallow, and somewhat narrow to have contained the wrapped and
embalmed mummy of a noble pharaoh, its smooth red granite sides
reached to about knee height.
As I gazed into its dark interior, it seemed to gape like the doorway to
another dimension.
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Chapter 37
Made by Some God
I had climbed the Great Pyramid the night before, but as I approached it
in the full glare of midday, I experienced no sense of triumph. On the
contrary, standing at its base on the north side, I felt fly-sized and puny—
an impermanent creature of flesh and blood confronted with the aweinspiring splendour of eternity. I had the impression that it might have
been here for ever, ‘made by some god and set down bodily in the
surrounding sand’, as the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus commented in
the first century BC.1 But which god had made it, if not the God-King
Khufu whose name generations of Egyptians had associated with it?
For the second time in twelve hours, I began to climb the monument.
Up close in this light, indifferent to human chronologies and subject only
to the slow erosive forces of geological time, it reared above me like a
frowning, terrifying crag. Fortunately, I only had six courses to clamber
over, assisted in places by modern steps, before reaching Ma’mun’s Hole,
which now served as the pyramid’s principal entrance.
The original entrance, still well-hidden in the ninth century when
Ma’mun began tunnelling, was some ten courses higher, 55 feet above
ground level and 24 feet east of the main north-south axis. Protected by
giant limestone gables, it contained the mouth of the descending
corridor, which led downwards at an angle of 26° 31’ 23”. Strangely,
although itself measuring only some 3 feet 5 inches x 3 feet 11 inches,
this corridor was sandwiched between roofing blocks 8 feet 6 inches
thick and 12 feet wide and a flooring slab (known as the ‘Basement
Sheet’) 2 feet 6 inches thick and 33 feet wide.2
Hidden structural features like these abounded in the Great Pyramid,
manifesting both incredible complexity and apparent pointlessness.
Nobody knew how blocks of this size had been successfully installed,
neither did anybody know how they had been set so carefully in
alignment with other blocks, or at such precise angles (because, as the
reader may have realized, the 26° slope of the descending corridor was
part of a deliberate and regular pattern). Nobody knew either why these
things had been done.
The Beacon
Entering the pyramid through Ma’mun’s Hole did not feel right. It was like
1 Diodorus Siculus, Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 217.
2 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 88; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, pp. 30-1.
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entering a cave or grotto cut into the side of a mountain; it lacked the
sense of deliberate and geometrical purposefulness that would have been
conveyed by the original descending corridor. Worse still, the dark and
inauspicious horizontal tunnel leading inwards looked like an ugly,
deformed thing and still bore the marks of violence where the Arab
workmen had alternately heated and chilled the stones with fierce fires
and cold vinegar before attacking them with hammers and chisels,
battering rams and borers.
On the one hand, such vandalism seemed gross and irresponsible. On
the other, a startling possibility had to be considered: was there not a
sense in which the pyramid seemed to have been designed to invite
human beings of intelligence and curiosity to penetrate its mysteries?
After all, if you were a pharaoh who wanted to ensure that his deceased
body remained inviolate for eternity, would it make better sense (a) to
advertise to your own and all subsequent generations the whereabouts of
your burial place, or (b) to choose some secret and unknown location, of
which you would never speak and where you might never be found?
The answer was obvious: you would go for secrecy and seclusion, as the
vast majority of the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt had done.3
Why, then, if it was indeed a royal tomb, was the Great Pyramid so
conspicuous? Why did it occupy a ground area of more than thirteen
acres? Why was it almost 500 feet high? Why, in other words, if its
purpose was to conceal and protect the body of Khufu, had it been
designed so that it could not fail to attract the attention—in all epochs
and under all imaginable circumstances—of treasure-crazed adventurers
and of prying and imaginative intellectuals?
It was simply not credible that the brilliant architects, stonemasons,
surveyors and engineers who had created the Great Pyramid could have
been ignorant of basic human psychology. The vast ambition and the
transcendent beauty, power and artistry of their handiwork spoke of
and primordial patterns by which the minds of men could be
manipulated. Logic therefore suggested that the pyramid builders must
also have understood exactly what kind of beacon they were piling up
(with such incredible precision) on this windswept plateau, on the west
bank of the Nile, in those high and far away times.
They must, in short, have wanted this remarkable structure to exert a
perennial fascination: to be violated by intruders, to be measured with
increasing degrees of exactitude, and to haunt the collective imagination
of mankind like a persistent ghost summoning intimations of a profound
and long-forgotten secret.
3 In the isolated Valley of the Kings in Luxor in upper Egypt, for example.
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Mind games of the pyramid builders
The point where Ma’mun’s Hole intersected with the 26° descending
corridor was closed off by a modern steel door. Beyond it, to the north,
that corridor sloped up until it reached the gables of the monument’s
original entrance. To the south, as we have seen, the corridor sloped
down for almost another 350 feet into the bedrock, before opening out
into a huge subterranean chamber 600 feet beneath the apex of the
pyramid. The accuracy of this corridor was astonishing. From top to
bottom the average deviation from straight amounted to less than 1/4inch in the sides and 3/10-inch on the roof.4
Passing the steel door, I continued through Ma’mun’s tunnel, breathing
in its ancient air and adjusting my eyes to the gloom of the low-wattage
bulbs that lit it. Then ducking my head I began to climb through the
steep and narrow section hacked upwards by the Arab diggers in
their
feverish thrust to by-pass the series of granite plugs blocking the lower
part of the ascending corridor. At the top of the tunnel two of the original
plugs could be seen, still in situ but partially exposed by quarrying.
Egyptologists assumed that they had been slid into their present position
from above5—all the way down the lag-foot length of the ascending
corridor from the foot of the Grand Gallery.6 Builders and engineers,
however, whose trend of thought was perhaps more practical, had
pointed out that it was physically impossible for the plugs to have been
installed in this way. Because of the leaf-thin clearance that separated
them from the walls, floor and ceiling of the corridor, friction would have
foiled any ‘sliding’ operation in a matter of inches, let alone 100 feet.7
The puzzling implication was therefore that the ascending corridor
must have been plugged while the pyramid was still being built. But why
would anyone have wished to block the main entrance to the monument
at such an early stage in its construction (even while continuing to
enlarge and elaborate its inner chambers)? Moreover, if the objective had
been to deny intruders admission, wouldn’t it have been much easier and
more efficient to have plugged the descending corridor from its entrance
in the north face to a point below its junction with the ascending
corridor? That would have been the most logical way to seal the pyramid
and would have made plugs unnecessary in the ascending corridor.
There was only one certainty: since the beginning of history, the single
known effect of the granite plugs had not been to prevent an intruder
from gaining access; instead, like Bluebeard’s locked door, the barrier
had magnetized Ma’mun’s attention and inflamed his curiosity so that he
had felt compelled to tunnel his way past them, convinced that
4 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 19.
5 Discussed in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 230ff.
6 Dimension from The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 114.
7 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 230ff.
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something of inestimable value must lie beyond them.
Might this not have been what the pyramid builders had intended the
first intruder who reached this far to feel? It would be premature to rule