Fingerprints of the Gods

  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

  refined skills, deep insight, and a complete understanding of the symbols

  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