Page 283 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Following the course of the celestial river, I looked due south: there,
crossing the meridian, was the resplendent constellation of Scorpius
dominated by the first-magnitude star Antares—a red supergiant 300
times the diameter of the sun. North-east, above Cairo, sailed Cygnus the
swan, his tail feathers marked by Deneb, a blue-white supergiant visible
to us across more than 1800 light years of interstellar space. Last but not
least, in the northern sky, the dragon Draco coiled sinuously among the
circumpolar stars. Indeed, 4500 years ago, when the Great Pyramid was
supposedly being built for the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops),
one of the stars of Draco had stood close to the celestial north pole and
had served as the Pole Star. This had been alpha Draconis, also known as
Thuban. With the passing of the millennia, however, it had gradually been
displaced from its position by the remorseless celestial mill of the earth’s
axial precession so that the Pole Star today is Polaris in the Little Bear.
20
I lay back, cushioned my head in my hands and gazed directly up
towards the zenith of heaven. Through the smooth cold stones I rested
on, I thought I could sense beneath me, like a living force, the
stupendous gravity and mass of the pyramid.

Thinking like giants

Covering a full 13.1 acres at the base, it weighed about six million tons—
more than all the buildings in the Square Mile of the City of London
added together, and consisted, as we have seen, of roughly 2.3 million
21
individual blocks of limestone and granite. To these had once been added
a 22-acre, mirror-like cladding consisting of an estimated 115,000 highly
polished casing stones, each weighing 10 tons, which had originally
covered all four of its faces.
22
After being shaken loose by a massive earthquake in AD 1301, the
majority of the facing blocks had subsequently been removed for the
construction of Cairo. Here and there around the base, however, I knew
23
that enough had remained in position to permit the great nineteenth
century archaeologist, W.M. Flinders Petrie, to carry out a detailed study
of them. He had been stunned to encounter tolerances of less than one-
hundredth of an inch and cemented joints so precise and so carefully
aligned that it was impossible to slip even the fine blade of a pocket knife
between them. ‘Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be
careful work’, he admitted, ‘but to do so with cement in the joint seems
almost impossible; it is to be compared to the finest opticians’ work on a

20 Skyglobe 3.6.
How the Pyramids Were Built, p. 4-5.
21
22 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 232, 244.
23 Ibid., p. 17.

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