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  ambitious building project would have been one way cult members could

  preserve and transmit scientific information into the future independently

  of their physical survival. In other words, if the buildings were large

  enough, capable of enduring through immense spans of time and

  encoded through and through with the cult’s message, there would be

  hope that the message would be decoded at some future date even if the

  cult had by then long since ceased to exist.

  The hypothesis proposes that this is what the enigmatic structures on

  the Giza plateau are all about:

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  1 that the Great Sphinx is indeed, as we have argued in previous

  chapters, an equinoctial marker for the Age of Leo, indicating a date in

  our own chronology of between 10,970 BC and 8810 BC;

  2 that the three principal pyramids are indeed laid out in relation to the

  Nile Valley to mimic the precise dispositions of the three stars of

  Orion’s Belt in relation to the course of the Milky Way in 10,450 BC.

  This is a pretty effective means of ‘specifying’ the epoch of the eleventh

  millennium BC by using the phenomenon of precession, which has been

  rightly described as the ‘only true clock of our planet’.23 Confusingly,

  however, we also know that the Great Pyramid incorporates star shafts

  ‘locked in’ to Orion’s Belt and Sirius at around 2450 BC.24 The hypothesis

  resolves the anomaly of the missing years by supposing the star shafts to

  be merely the later work of the same long-lived cult that originally laid

  out the Giza ground-plan in 10,450 BC. Naturally, the hypothesis also

  suggests that it was this same cult, towards the end of those 8000

  missing years, that provided the initiating spark for the sudden and ‘fully

  formed’ emergence of the literate historical civilization of dynastic Egypt.

  What remains to be guessed at are the motives of the pyramid builders,

  who were presumably the same people as the mysterious cartographers

  who mapped the globe at the end of the last Ice Age in the northern

  hemisphere. If so, we might also ask why these highly civilized and

  technically accomplished architects and navigators were obsessed with

  charting the gradual glaciation of the enigmatic southern continent of

  Antarctica from the fourteenth millennium BC—when Hapgood calculates

  that the source map referred to by Phillipe Buache was drawn up—down

  to about the end of the fifth millennium BC?

  Could they have been making a permanent cartographical record of the

  slow obliteration of their homeland?

  And could their overwhelming desire to transmit a message to the

  future through a variety of different media—myths, maps, buildings,

  calendar systems, mathematical harmonies—have been connected to the

  cataclysms and earth changes that caused this loss?

  An urgent mission

  The possession of a conscious, articulated history is one of the faculties

  that distinguishes human beings from animals. Unlike rats, say, or sheep,

  or cows, or pheasants, we have a past which is separate from ourselves.

  We therefore have the opportunity, as I have said, to learn from the

  experiences of our predecessors.

  Is it because we are perverse, or misguided, or simply stupid that we

  23 By Robert Bauval, personal communication.

  24 See Part VII.

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  refuse to recognize those experiences unless they have come down to us

  in the form of bona fide ‘historical records’? And is it arrogance or

  ignorance which leads us to draw an arbitrary line separating ‘history’

  from ‘prehistory’ at about 5000 years before the present—defining the

  records of ‘history’ as valid testimony and the records of ‘prehistory’ as

  primitive delusions?

  At this stage in a continuing investigation, my instinct is that we may

  have put ourselves in danger by closing our ears for so long to the

  disturbing ancestral voices which reach us in the form of myths. This is

  more an intuitive than a rational feeling, but it is by no means

  unreasonable. My research has filled me with respect for the logical

  thinking, high science, deep psychological insights, and vast

  cosmographical knowledge of the ancient geniuses who composed those

  myths, and who, I am now fully persuaded, descended from the same lost

  civilization that produced the map-makers, pyramid builders, navigators,

  astronomers and earth-measurers whose fingerprints we have been

  following across the continents and oceans of the earth.

  Since I have learned to respect those long-forgotten and still only hazily

  identified Newtons and Shakespeares and Einsteins of the last Ice Age, I

  think it would be foolish to disregard what they seem to be saying. And

  what they seem to be saying to us is this: that cyclical, recurrent and

  near-total destructions of mankind are part and parcel of life on this

  planet, that such destructions have occurred many times before and that

  they will certainly occur again.

  What, after all, is the remarkable calendrical system of the Mayas if it is

  not a medium for transmitting exactly this message? What, if not vehicles

  for the same sort of bad news are the traditions of the four previous

  ‘Suns’ (or sometimes of the three previous ‘Worlds’) passed down in the

  Americas since time immemorial? By the same token, what might be the

  function of the great myths of precession which speak not just of

  previous cataclysms but of cataclysms to come and which (through the

  metaphor of the cosmic mill) link these earthly disasters to ‘disturbances

  in the heavens’? Last but by no means least, what burning motive

  impelled the pyramid builders to erect, with such care, the powerful and

  mysterious edifices on the Giza plateau?

  Yes, they were saying, ‘Kilroy was here’.

  And, yes, they found an ingenious way to tell us when they were here.

  Of these things I have no doubt.

  I am also impressed by the enormous lengths they went to to provide

  us with convincing proof that theirs was a serious and scientifically

  advanced civilization. And I am even more impressed by the sense of

  urgency—of a vitally important mission—that seems to have enlightened

  all their works and deeds.

  I go on intuition again, not on evidence.

  It’s my guess that their underlying objective could have been to

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  transmit a warning to the future, and that this warning could be to do

  with a global cataclysm, perhaps even a recurrence of the same cataclysm

  that so clearly devastated mankind at the end of the last Ice Age when

  ‘Noah saw that the earth had tilted, and that its destruction was near, and

  cried out in a bitter voice: “Tell me what is being done on the earth that

  the earth is so afflicted and shaken ...” ’25 These words are from the

  Hebrew Book of Enoch, but similar afflictions and shakings have been

  foretold in all the Central American traditions that speak of the demise of

  the pres
ent epoch of the world—an epoch, as the reader will recall, in

  which ‘the elders say [that] there will be a movement of the earth and

  from this we shall all perish.’26

  The reader will also not have forgotten the date calculated by the

  Ancient Maya calendar for the end of the world:

  The day will be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin [corresponding to 23 December AD 2012], and it

  will be ruled by the Sun God, the ninth Lord of the Night. The moon will be eight

  days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six ...27

  In the Mayan scheme of things we are already living in the last days of the

  earth.

  In the Christian scheme of things too, the last days are understood to

  be upon us. According to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of

  Pennsylvania: ‘This world will perish just as surely as did the world before

  the Flood ... Many things were foretold to occur during the last days, and

  all of these are being fulfilled. This means that the end of the world is

  near ...’28

  Similarly the Christian psychic Edgar Cayce prophesied in 1934 that

  around the year 2000: ‘There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be

  upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make for the eruption

  of volcanoes in the Torrid areas ... The upper portion of Europe will be

  changed in the twinkling of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the

  western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into

  the sea.’29

  Curiously the epoch of the year 2000, which figures in these Christian

  prophecies, also coincides with the Last Time (or highest point) in the

  great upwards cycle of the belt stars of the Orion constellation, just as

  the epoch of the eleventh millennium BC coincided with the First Time (or

  lowest point) of that cycle.

  And curiously, also, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-eight:

  A conjunction of five planets that can be expected to have profound gravitational

  25 1 Enoch, LXV, in The Apockryphal Old Testament (ed. H.F.D. Sparks), Clarendon Press,

  Oxford, 1989, p. 247.

  26 Pre-Hispanic Gods of Mexico, p. 24.

  27 Breaking the Maya Code, p. 275.

  28 Will The World Survive? Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, 1992.

  29 Circulating File, Earth Changes, Extracts from the Edgar Cayce Readings, Edgar Cayce

  Foundation, Virginia Beach, 1994, p. 36.

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  effects will take place on 5 May in the year 2000, when Neptune, Uranus, Venus,

  Mercury and Mars will align with the Earth on the other side of the sun, setting up

  a sort of cosmic tug-of-war ... 30

  Could the recondite influences of gravity, when combined with our

  planet’s precessional wobble, the torsional effects of its axial rotation,

  and the rapidly growing mass and weight of the Antarctic ice-cap, be

  enough to spark off a full-scale crustal displacement?

  We may never know, one way or another—unless it happens.

  Meanwhile, I do not think the Egyptian scribe Manetho was being less

  than literal when he spoke of a harsh and deadly cosmic power at work in

  the universe:

  Just as iron is likely to be attracted and led after the loadstone, but often turns

  away and is repelled in the opposite direction, so the salutary, good and rational

  movement of the world at one time attracts, conciliates and mollifies that harsh

  power; then again, when the latter has recovered itself, it overthrows the other

  and reduces it to helplessness ...31

  In short, through metaphors and allegories, I suspect the ancients may

  have tried to find many ways to tell us exactly when—and why—the

  hammer of global destruction is going to strike again. I therefore think,

  after 12,500 years of the pendulum, that it would only be wise for us to

  devote more of our resources to studying the signs and messages that

  have come down to us from that dark and terrifying period of amnesia

  which our species calls prehistory.

  A speeding up of physical research at the Giza plateau would also be

  highly desirable—not only by Egyptologists determined to resist any

  threats to the scholarly status quo but by eclectic teams of investigators

  who could bring some of the newer sciences to bear on the challenges of

  this most enigmatic and impenetrable of sites. The Chlorine-36 rockexposure dating technique mentioned in Chapter Six, for example, looks

  like a particularly promising means of resolving the impasse over the

  antiquity of the Pyramids and the Sphinx.32 Likewise, if the will is there,

  then a way can be found to get through to whatever lies beyond the little

  door concealed in the Great Pyramid 200 feet up the southern shaft of

  30 See Part V.

  31 Manetho, pp. 191-3.

  32 The Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating technique has been developed by Professor

  David Bowen of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Wales. In The

  Times of London, 1 December 1994, Brown observed:

  ‘One way of resolving the controversy of the ages of the Sphinx and the Pyramids may

  be through the application of Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating. This provides an

  estimate of the time that has elapsed since a rock was first exposed to the atmosphere.

  In the case of the Sphinx and the Pyramids this would be when the rocks were first

  exposed by quarrying activity ...’

  In 1994 Bowen ran preliminary tests on the famous ‘bluestones’ of Stonehenge in

  England, hitherto believed to date to 2250 BC. What the tests showed was that these 123

  four-ton monoliths could have been quarried during the last Ice Age—perhaps as early

  as 12000 BC. See The Times, London, 5 December.

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  the Queen’s Chamber. At the same time serious efforts should be made

  to investigate the contents of the large, square-edged and apparently

  man-made cavity in the bedrock, deep beneath the paws of the Sphinx,

  that was discovered when a seismic survey was carried out at the site in

  1993.33

  Last but not least, far away from Giza, I suspect that our efforts might

  also be repaid if we were to undertake a proper investigation of the subglacial landscapes of Antarctica—much the most likely continent to hide

  the complete remains of a lost civilization. If we could establish what

  destroyed that civilization, then we might be in a better position to save

  ourselves from a similar cataclysmic fate.

  In making these latter suggestions I am, of course, fully aware that

  there are many who will be scornful and will assert the uniformitarian

  view that ‘all things will continue as they have done since the beginning

  of creation.’34 But I am also aware that such ‘scoffers in the last days’35 are

  those who for one reason or another are deaf to the testimony of our

  forgotten ancestors. As we have seen, this testimony appears to be trying

  to tell us that a hideous calamity has indeed descended upon mankind

  from time to time, that on each occasion it has afflicted us suddenly,

  without warning and without mercy, like a thief in the night, and that it

  will certainly recur at some point in the future, obliging us—unless we are

  well
prepared—to begin again like orphaned children in complete

  ignorance of our true heritage.

  Walking in the last days

  Hopi Indian Reservation, May 1994: Across the high plains of Arizona, for

  days and days and days, a desolate wind had been blowing. As we drove

  across those plains towards the tiny village of Shungopovi, I went over in

  my mind all I had seen and done in the previous five years: my travels,

  my research, the false starts and dead-ends I had encountered, the lucky

  breaks, the moments when everything had come together, the moments

  when everything seemed about to fall apart.

  I had travelled a long road to get here, I realized—far longer than the

  300-mile freeway that had whisked us up into these austere badlands

  from Phoenix, the state capital. Nor did I expect to return with any great

  degree of enlightenment.

  Nevertheless, I had made this journey because the science of prophecy

  is still believed to be alive among the Hopi: Pueblo Indians, distantly

  related to the Aztecs of Mexico, whose numbers have been reduced by

  33 Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.

  34 2 Peter 3:4.

  35 2 Peter 3:3.

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  attrition and misery to barely 10,000.36 Like the Ancient Maya whose

  descendants all across the Yucatan are convinced that the end of the

  world is coming in the year 2000 y pico (and a little),37 the Hopi believe

  that we are walking in the last days, with a geological sword of Damocles

  hanging over us.38 According to their myths, as we saw in Chapter

  Twenty-four:

  The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanours, by an

  all-consuming fire that came from above and below. The second world ended

  when the terrestrial globe toppled from its axis and everything was covered with

  ice. The third world ended in a universal flood. The present world is the fourth. Its

  fate will depend on whether or not its inhabitants behave in accordance with the

  Creator’s plans ...’39

  I had come to Arizona to see whether the Hopi thought we were behaving

  in accordance with the Creator’s plans ...

  The end of the world

  The desolate wind, blowing across the high plains, shook and rattled the

  sides of the trailer-home we sat in. Beside me was Santha, who’d been