Page 312 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

The Grand Gallery and the King’s and Queen’s Chambers with their
northern and southern shafts.
The reason, though I was unaware of it at the time, was that a German
robotics engineer named Rudolf Gantenbrink was at work within, slowly
and painstakingly manoeuvring a $250,000 robot up the narrow southern
shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. Hired by the Egyptian Antiquities
Organization to improve the ventilation of the Great Pyramid, he had
already used his high-tech equipment to clear debris from the King’s
Chamber’s narrow ‘southern shaft’ (believed by Egyptologists to have
been designed as a ventilation shaft in the first place) and had installed
an electric fan at its mouth. At the beginning of March 1993 he
transferred his attentions to the Queen’s Chamber, deploying Upuaut, a
miniaturized remote-controlled robot camera to explore its southern
shaft. On 22 March, some 200 feet along the steeply sloping shaft (which
rose at an angle of 39.5° and was only about 8 inches high x 9 inches
wide), the floor and walls suddenly became very smooth as Upuaut
15
crawled into a section made of fine Tura limestone, the type normally
used for lining sacred areas such as chapels or tombs. That, in itself, was
intriguing enough, but at the end of this corridor, apparently leading to a
sealed chamber deep within the pyramid’s masonry, was a solid
limestone door complete with metal fittings ...
It had long been known that neither this southern shaft nor its
counterpart in the Chamber’s northern wall had any exit on the outside of
the Great Pyramid. In addition, and equally inexplicably, neither had
originally been fully cut through. For some reason the builders had left
the last five inches of stone intact in the last block over the mouth of
each of the shafts, thus rendering them invisible and inaccessible to any

15 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 24.

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