Page 301 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

out of its walls: four on the eastern side and two to the north. These were
presumed by Egyptologists to have functioned as ‘magazines ... for
storing objects which the dead king wished to have close to his body.’
6
Coming out of this chamber, we turned right again, back into the
horizontal passage. At its end lay another empty chamber, the design of
7
which is unique among the pyramids of Egypt. Some twelve feet long by
eight wide, and oriented north to south, its walls and extensively broken
and damaged floor were fashioned out of a peculiarly dense, chocolate-
coloured granite which seemed to absorb light and sound waves. Its
ceiling consisted of eighteen huge slabs of the same material, nine on
each side, laid in facing gables. Because they had had been hollowed
from below to form a markedly concave surface, the effect of these great
monoliths was of a perfect barrel vault, much as one might expect to find
in the crypt of a Romanesque cathedral.
Retracing our steps, we left the lower chambers and walked back up the
ramp to the large, flat-roofed, rock-hewn room above. Passing through
the ragged aperture in its western wall, we found ourselves looking
directly at the upper sides of the eighteen slabs which formed the ceiling
of the chamber below. From this perspective their true form as a pointed
gable was immediately apparent. What was less clear was how they had
been brought in here in the first place, let alone laid so perfectly in
position. Each one must have weighed many tons, heavy enough to have
made them extremely difficult to handle under any circumstances. And
these were no ordinary circumstances. As though they had set out
deliberately to make things more complicated for themselves (or perhaps
because they found such tasks simple?) the pyramid builders had
disdained to provide an adequate working area between the slabs and the
bedrock above them. By crawling into the cavity, I was able to establish
that the clearance varied from approximately two feet at the southern end
to just a few inches at the northern end. In such a restricted space there
was no possibility that the monoliths could have been lowered into
position. Logically, therefore, they must have been raised from the
chamber floor, but how had that been done? The chamber was so small
that only a few men could have worked inside it at any one time—too few
to have had the muscle-power to lift the slabs by brute force. Pulleys were
not supposed to have existed in the Pyramid Age (even if they had, there
8
would have been insufficient room to set up block-and-tackle). Had some
unknown system of levers been used? Or might there be more substance
than scholars realized to the Ancient Egyptian legends that spoke of huge

6 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 127.
7 It was in this chamber that Vyse found the intrusive burial (of bones and a wooden
coffin lid) referred to in Chapter Thirty-Five. The basalt coffin where he also found (later
lost at sea) is believed to have been part of the same intrusive burial and to have not
been older than the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. See, for example, Blue Guide, Egypt, p. 433.
8 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 220.

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