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.
300