Page 325 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

into its murky depths where the dim electric lighting of the chamber
seemed hardly to penetrate and saw specks of dust swirling in a golden
cloud.
It was just a trick of light and shadow, of course, but the King’s
Chamber was full of such illusions. I remembered that Napoleon
Bonaparte had paused to spend a night alone here during his conquest of
Egypt in the late eighteenth century. The next morning he had emerged
pale and shaken, having experienced something which had profoundly
disturbed him but about which he never afterwards spoke.
22
Had he tried to sleep in the sarcophagus?
Acting on impulse, I climbed into the granite coffer and lay down, face
upwards, my feet pointed towards the south and my head to the north.
Napoleon was a little guy, so he must have fitted comfortably. There
was plenty of room for me too. But had Khufu been here as well?
I relaxed and tried not to worry about the possibility of one of the
pyramid guards coming in and finding me in this embarrassing and
probably illegal position. Hoping that I would remain undisturbed for a
few minutes, I folded my hands across my chest and gave voice to a
sustained low-pitched tone—something I had tried out several times
before at other points in the King’s Chamber. On those occasions, in the
centre of the floor, I had noticed that the walls and ceiling seemed to
collect the sound, to gather and to amplify it and project it back at me so
that I could sense the returning vibrations through my feet and scalp and
skin.
Now in the sarcophagus I was aware of very much the same effect,
although seemingly amplified and concentrated many times over. It was
like being in the sound-box of some giant, resonant musical instrument
designed to emit for ever just one reverberating note. The sound was
intense and quite disturbing. I imagined it rising out of the coffer and
bouncing off the red granite walls and ceiling of the King’s Chamber,
shooting up through the northern and southern ‘ventilation’ shafts and
spreading across the Giza plateau like a sonic mushroom cloud.
With this ambitious vision in my mind, and with the sound of my low-
pitched note echoing in my ears and causing the sarcophagus to vibrate
around me, I closed my eyes. When I opened them a few minutes later it
was to behold a distressing sight: six Japanese tourists of mixed ages
and sexes had congregated around the sarcophagus—two of them
standing to the east, two to the west and one each to the north and
south.
They all looked ... amazed. And I was amazed to see them. Because of
recent attacks by armed Islamic extremists there were now almost no
tourists at Giza and I had expected to have the King’s Chamber to myself.
What does one do in a situation like this?

22 Reported in P. W. Roberts, River in the Desert: Modern Travels in Ancient Egypt,
Random House, New York and Toronto, 1993, p. 115.

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