Page 302 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock
P. 302

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS



                   stones being effortlessly levitated by priests or magicians through the
                   utterance of ‘words of power’?
                                                      9
                     Not for the first time when confronted by the mysteries of the pyramids
                   I knew that I was looking at an  impossible  engineering feat which had
                   nevertheless been carried out to astonishingly high and precise
                   standards. Moreover, if Egyptologists were to be believed, the
                   construction work had supposedly been undertaken at the dawn of
                   human civilization by a people who had not accumulated any experience
                   of massive construction projects.
                     This was, of course, a startling cultural paradox, and one for to which
                   no adequate explanation had ever been offered by an orthodox academic.



                   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 north-
                   south 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’.  From the former, by which we now entered the
                                         10
                   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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