Page 318 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 38

Interactive Three-Dimensional Game

Reaching the top of the Grand Gallery, I clambered over a chunky granite
step about three feet high. I remembered that it lay, like the roof of the
Queen’s Chamber, exactly along the east-west axis of the Great Pyramid,
And therefore marked the point of transition between the northern and
southern halves of the monument. Somewhat like an altar in appearance,
1
the step also provided a solid horizontal platform immediately in front of
the low square tunnel that served as the entrance to the King’s Chamber.
Pausing for a moment, I looked back down the Gallery, taking in once
again its lack of decoration, its lack of religious iconography, and its
absolute lack of any of the recognizable symbolism normally associated
with the archaic belief system of the Ancient Egyptians. All that registered
upon the eye, along the entire 153-foot length of this magnificent
geometrical cavity, was its disinterested regularity and its stark machine-
like simplicity.
Looking up, I could just make out the opening of a dark aperture,
chiselled into the top of the eastern wall above my head. Nobody knew
when or by whom this foreboding hole had been cut, or how deep it had
originally penetrated. It led to the first of the five relieving chambers
above the King’s Chamber and had been extended in 1837 when Howard
Vyse had used it to break through to the remaining four. Looking down
again, I could just make out the point at the bottom of the Gallery’s
western wall where the near-vertical well-shaft began its precipitous 160
foot descent through the core of the pyramid to join the descending
corridor far below ground-level.
Why would such a complicated apparatus of pipes and passageways
have been required? At first sight it didn’t make sense. But then nothing
about the Great Pyramid did make much sense, unless you were prepared
to devote a great deal of attention to it. In unpredictable ways, when you
did that, it would from time to time reward you.
If you were sufficiently numerate, for example, as we have seen, it
would respond to your basic inquiries into its height and base perimeter
by ‘printing out’ the value of pi. And if you were prepared to investigate
further, as we shall see, it would download other useful mathematical
tidbits, each a little more complex and abstruse that its predecessor.
There was a programmed feel about this whole process, as though it
had been carefully prearranged. Not for the first time, I found myself
willing to consider the possibility that the pyramid might have been

1 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 25.

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