out such a strange and unsettling possibility. At any rate, thanks to
Ma’mun (and to the predictable constants of human nature) I was now
able to insert myself into the unblocked upper section of the original
ascending corridor. A smoothly cut aperture measuring 3 feet 5 inches
wide x 3 feet 11 inches high (exactly the same dimensions as the
descending corridor), it sloped up into the darkness at an angle of 26° 2’
30”8 (as against 26° 31’ 23” in the descending corridor).9
What was this meticulous interest in the angle of 26°, and was it a
coincidence that it amounted to half of the angle of inclination of the
pyramid’s sides—52°.10
The reader may recall the significance of this angle. It was a key
ingredient of the sophisticated and advanced formula by which the
design of the Great Pyramid had been made to correspond precisely to
the dynamics of spherical geometry. Thus the original height of the
monument (481.3949 feet), and the perimeter of its base (3023.16 feet),
stood in the same ratio to each other as did the radius of a sphere to its
circumference. This ratio was 2pi (2 x 3.14) and to express it the builders
had been obliged to specify the tricky and idiosyncratic angle of 52° for
the pyramid’s sides (since any greater or lesser slope would have meant a
different height-to-perimeter ratio).
In Chapter Twenty-three we saw that the so-called Pyramid of the Sun at
Teotihuacan in Mexico also expressed a knowledge and deliberate use of
the transcendental number pi; in its case the height (233.5 feet) stood in
a relationship of 4pi to the perimeter of its base (2932.76 feet).11
The crux, therefore, was that the most remarkable monument of
Ancient Egypt and the most remarkable monument of Ancient Mexico
both incorporated pi relationships long before and far away from the
official ‘discovery’ of this transcendental number by the Greeks.12
Moreover, the evidence invited the conclusion that something was being
signalled by the use of pi— almost certainly the same thing in both cases.
Not for the first time, and not for the last, I was overwhelmed by a
sense of contact with an ancient intelligence, not necessarily Egyptian or
Mexican, which had found a way to reach out across the ages and draw
people towards it like a beacon. Some might look for treasure; others,
captivated by the deceptively simple manner in which the builders had
used pi to demonstrate their mastery of the secrets of transcendental
numbers, might be inspired to search for further mathematical
8 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 91.
9 Ibid., p. 88.
10 Or 51° 50’ 35” to be exact, Ibid., page 87; Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 112.
11 See Chapter Twenty-three.
12 Ibid.
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epiphanies.
Bent almost double, my back brushing against the polished limestone
ceiling, it was with such thoughts in my mind that I began to scramble up
the 26° slope of the ascending corridor, which seemed to penetrate the
vast bulk of the six million ton building like a trigonometrical device.
After I had banged my head on its ceiling a couple of times, however, I
began to wonder why the ingenious people who’d designed it hadn’t
made it two or three feet higher. If they could erect a monument like this
in the first place (which they obviously could) and equip it with corridors,
surely it would not have been beyond their capabilities to make those
corridors roomy enough to stand up in? Once again I was tempted to
conclude that it was the result of a deliberate decision by the pyramid
builders: they had made the ascending corridor this way because they
had wanted it this way (rather than because such a design had been
forced upon them.)
Was there motive in the apparent madness of these archaic mind
games?
Unknown dark distance
At the top of the ascending corridor I emerged into yet another
inexplicable feature of the pyramid, ‘the most celebrated architectural
work to have survived from the Old Kingdom’13—the Grand Gallery.
Soaring upwards at the continuing majestic angle of 26°, and almost
entirely vanishing into the airy gloom above, its spacious corbelled vault
made a stunning impression.
It was not my intention to climb the Grand Gallery yet. Branching off
due south at its base was a long horizontal passageway, 3 feet 9 inches
high and 127 feet in length, that led to the Queen’s Chamber.14 I wanted
to revisit this room, which I had admired for its stark beauty since
becoming acquainted with the Great Pyramid several years previously.
Today, however, to my considerable irritation, the passageway was barred
within a few feet of its entrance.
13 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 93.
14 Dimensions from Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 121, and The Pyramids of Egypt,
p. 93.
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The Grand Gallery and the King’s and Queen’s Chambers with their
northern and southern shafts.
The reason, though I was unaware of it at the time, was that a German
robotics engineer named Rudolf Gantenbrink was at work within, slowly
and painstakingly manoeuvring a $250,000 robot up the narrow southern
shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. Hired by the Egyptian Antiquities
Organization to improve the ventilation of the Great Pyramid, he had
already used his high-tech equipment to clear debris from the King’s
Chamber’s narrow ‘southern shaft’ (believed by Egyptologists to have
been designed as a ventilation shaft in the first place) and had installed
an electric fan at its mouth. At the beginning of March 1993 he
transferred his attentions to the Queen’s Chamber, deploying Upuaut, a
miniaturized remote-controlled robot camera to explore its southern
shaft. On 22 March, some 200 feet along the steeply sloping shaft (which
rose at an angle of 39.5° and was only about 8 inches high x 9 inches
wide),15 the floor and walls suddenly became very smooth as Upuaut
crawled into a section made of fine Tura limestone, the type normally
used for lining sacred areas such as chapels or tombs. That, in itself, was
intriguing enough, but at the end of this corridor, apparently leading to a
sealed chamber deep within the pyramid’s masonry, was a solid
limestone door complete with metal fittings ...
It had long been known that neither this southern shaft nor its
counterpart in the Chamber’s northern wall had any exit on the outside of
the Great Pyramid. In addition, and equally inexplicably, neither had
originally been fully cut through. For some reason the builders had left
the last five inches of stone intact in the last block over the mouth of
each of the shafts, thus rendering them invisible and inaccessible to any
15 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 24.
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casual intruder.
Why? To make sure they would never be found? Or to make sure that
th
ey would be found, some day, under the right circumstances?
After all, there had from the beginning been two conspicuous shafts in
the King’s Chamber, penetrating the north and south walls. It should not
have been beyond the mental powers of the pyramid builders to predict
that sooner or later some inquiring person would be tempted to look for
shafts in the Queen’s Chamber as well. In the event nobody did look for
more than a thousand years after Caliph Ma’mun had opened the
monument to the world in AD 820. Then in 1872 an English engineer
named Waynman Dixon, a Freemason who ‘had been led to suspect the
existence of the shafts by their presence in the King’s Chamber above’,16
went tapping around the Queen’s Chamber’s walls and located them. He
opened the southern shaft first, setting his ‘carpenter and man-of-allwork, Bill Grundy, to jump a hole with a hammer and steel chisel at that
place. So to work the faithful fellow went, and with a will which soon
began to make a way into the soft stone [limestone] at this point, when
lo! after a comparatively very few strokes, flop went the chisel right
through into something or other.’17
The ‘something or other’ Bill Grundy’s chisel had reached turned out to
be ‘a rectangular, horizontal, tubular channel, about 9 inches by 8 inches
in transverse breadth and height, going back 7 feet into the wall, and
then rising at an angle into an unknown, dark distance ...’18
It was up that angle, and into that ‘unknown dark distance’, 121 years
later, that Rudolf Gantenbrink sent his robot—the technology of our
species having finally caught up with our powerful instincts to pry. Those
instincts were clearly no weaker in 1872 than in 1993; among the many
interesting things the remote-controlled camera succeeded in filming in
the Queen’s Chamber shafts was the far end of a long, sectioned metal
rod of nineteenth century design which Waynman Dixon and the faithful
Bill Grundy had secretly stuffed up the intriguing channel.19 Predictably,
they had assumed that if the pyramid builders had gone to the trouble of
constructing and then concealing the shafts, then they must have hidden
something worth looking for inside them.
The notion that there might have been an intention from the outset to
stimulate such investigations would seem quite implausible if the final
upshot of the discovery and exploration of the shafts had been a deadend. Instead, as we have seen, a door was found—a sliding, portcullis
door with curious metal fittings and an enticing gap at its base beneath
which the laser-spot projected by Gantenbrink’s robot was seen to
16 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 92.
17 The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed, p. 428.
18 Ibid.
19 Presentation at the British Museum, 22 November 1993, by Rudolf Gantenbrink, of
footage shot in the shafts by the robot camera Upuaut.
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disappear entirely ...
Once again there seemed to be a clear invitation to proceed further, the
latest in a long line of invitations which had encouraged Caliph Ma’mun
and his diggers to break into the central passageways and chambers of
the monument, which had waited for Waynman Dixon to test the
hypothesis that the walls of the Queen’s Chamber might contain
concealed shafts, and which had then waited again until arousing the
curiosity of Rudolf Gantenbrink, whose high-tech robot revealed the
existence of the hidden door and brought within reach whatever secrets—
or disappointments, or further invitations—might lie behind it.
The Queen’s Chamber
We shall hear more of Rudolf Gantenbrink and Upuaut in later chapters.
16 March 1993, however, knowing nothing of this, I was frustrated to
find the Queen’s Chamber closed, and glared resentfully through the
metal grille that barred its entrance corridor.
I remembered that the height of that corridor, 3 feet 9 inches, was not
constant. Approximately 110 feet due south from where I stood, and only
about 15 feet from the entrance to the Chamber, a sudden downward
step in the floor increased the standing-room to 5 feet 8 inches.20 Nobody
had come up with a convincing explanation for this peculiar feature.
The Queen’s Chamber itself—apparently empty since the day it was
built—measured 17 feet 2 inches from north to south and 18 feet 10
inches from east to west. It was equipped with an elegant gabled ceiling,
20 feet 5 inches in height, which lay exactly along the east-west axis of
the pyramid.21 Its floor, however, was the opposite of elegant and looked
unfinished. There was a constant salty emanation through its pale, roughhewn limestone walls, giving rise to much fruitless speculation.
In the north and south walls, still bearing the incised legend OPENED
1872, were the rectangular apertures discovered by Waynman Dixon
which led into the dark distance of the mysterious shafts. The western
wall was quite bare. Offset a little over two feet to the south of its centre
line, the eastern wall was dominated by a niche in the form of a corbel
vault 15 feet 4 inches high and 5 feet 2 inches wide at the base.
Originally 3 feet 5 inches deep, a further cavity had been cut in the back
of this niche in medieval times by Arab treasure-seekers looking for
hidden chambers.22 They had found nothing.
Egyptologists had also been unable to come to any persuasive
conclusions about the original function of the niche, or, for that matter,
of the Queen’s Chamber as a whole.
20 The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 92-3.
21 Ibid., p. 92; The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 23.
22 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 92.
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All was confusion. All was paradox. All was mystery.
Instrument
The Grand Gallery had its mysteries too. Indeed it was among the most
mysterious of all the internal features of the Great Pyramid. Measuring 6
feet 9 inches wide at the floor, its walls rose vertically to a height of 7
feet 6 inches; above that level seven further courses of masonry (each
one projecting inwards some 3 inches beyond the course immediately
below it) carried the vault to its full height of 28 feet and its culminating
width of 3 feet 5 inches.23
Remember that structurally the Gallery was required to support, for
ever, the multi-million ton weight of the upper three-quarters of the
largest and heaviest stone monument ever built on planet earth. Was it
not quite remarkable that a group of supposed ‘technological primitives’
had not only envisaged and designed such a feature but had completed it
successfully, more than 4500 years before our time?
Even if they had made the Gallery only 20 feet long, and had sought to
erect it on a level plane, the task would have been difficult enough—
indeed extraordinarily difficult. But they had opted to erect this
astonishing corbel vault at a slope of 26°, and to extend its length to a
staggering 153 feet.24 Moreover, they had made it with perfectly dressed
limestone megalit
hs throughout—huge, smoothly polished blocks carved
into sloping parallelograms and laid together so closely and with such
rigorous precision that the joints were almost invisible to the naked eye.
The pyramid builders had also included some interesting symmetries in
their work. For example, the culminating width of the Gallery at its apex
was 3 feet 5 inches while its width at the floor was 6 feet 9 inches. At the
exact centre of the floor, running the entire length of the Gallery—and
sandwiched between flat-topped masonry ramps each 1 foot 8 inches
wide—there was a sunken channel 2 feet deep and 3 feet 5 inches wide.
What could have been the purpose of this slot? And why had it been
necessary for it to mirror so precisely the width and form of the ceiling,
which also looked like a ‘slot’ sandwiched between the two upper courses
of masonry?
I knew that I was not the first person to have stood at the foot of the
Grand Gallery and to have been overtaken by the disorienting sense of
being ‘in the inside of some enormous instrument of some sort.’25 Who
was to say that such intuitions were completely wrong? Or, for that
matter, that they were right? No record as to function remained, other
than in mystical and symbolic references in certain ancient Egyptian
23 Ibid., p. 93; Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 115.
24 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 93.
25 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 115.
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liturgical texts. These appeared to indicate that the pyramids had been
seen as devices designed to turn dead men into immortal beings: to
‘throw open the doors of the firmament and make a road’, so that the
deceased pharaoh might ‘ascend into the company of the gods’.26
I had no difficulty accepting that such a belief system might have been
at work here, and obviously it could have provided a motive for the whole
enterprise. Nevertheless, I was still puzzled why more than six million
tons of physical apparatus, intricately interlaced with channels and tubes,
corridors and chambers, had been deemed necessary to achieve a
mystical, spiritual and symbolic objective.
Being inside the Grand Gallery did feel like being inside an enormous
instrument. It had an undeniable aesthetic impact upon me (admittedly a