Page 313 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

casual intruder.
Why? To make sure they would never be found? Or to make sure that
they would be found, some day, under the right circumstances?
After all, there had from the beginning been two conspicuous shafts in
the King’s Chamber, penetrating the north and south walls. It should not
have been beyond the mental powers of the pyramid builders to predict
that sooner or later some inquiring person would be tempted to look for
shafts in the Queen’s Chamber as well. In the event nobody did look for
more than a thousand years after Caliph Ma’mun had opened the
monument to the world in AD 820. Then in 1872 an English engineer
named Waynman Dixon, a Freemason who ‘had been led to suspect the
existence of the shafts by their presence in the King’s Chamber above’,
16
went tapping around the Queen’s Chamber’s walls and located them. He
opened the southern shaft first, setting his ‘carpenter and man-of-all-
work, Bill Grundy, to jump a hole with a hammer and steel chisel at that
place. So to work the faithful fellow went, and with a will which soon
began to make a way into the soft stone [limestone] at this point, when
lo! after a comparatively very few strokes, flop went the chisel right
through into something or other.’
17
The ‘something or other’ Bill Grundy’s chisel had reached turned out to
be ‘a rectangular, horizontal, tubular channel, about 9 inches by 8 inches
in transverse breadth and height, going back 7 feet into the wall, and
then rising at an angle into an unknown, dark distance ...’
18
It was up that angle, and into that ‘unknown dark distance’, 121 years
later, that Rudolf Gantenbrink sent his robot—the technology of our
species having finally caught up with our powerful instincts to pry. Those
instincts were clearly no weaker in 1872 than in 1993; among the many
interesting things the remote-controlled camera succeeded in filming in
the Queen’s Chamber shafts was the far end of a long, sectioned metal
rod of nineteenth century design which Waynman Dixon and the faithful
Bill Grundy had secretly stuffed up the intriguing channel. Predictably,
19
they had assumed that if the pyramid builders had gone to the trouble of
constructing and then concealing the shafts, then they must have hidden
something worth looking for inside them.
The notion that there might have been an intention from the outset to
stimulate such investigations would seem quite implausible if the final
upshot of the discovery and exploration of the shafts had been a dead-
end. Instead, as we have seen, a door was found—a sliding, portcullis
door with curious metal fittings and an enticing gap at its base beneath
which the laser-spot projected by Gantenbrink’s robot was seen to

16 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 92.
17 The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed, p. 428.
Ibid.
18
19 Presentation at the British Museum, 22 November 1993, by Rudolf Gantenbrink, of
footage shot in the shafts by the robot camera Upuaut.

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