The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (7 page)

7. Internal corridors and passageways of the three Pyramids of Giza.

Chambers and passageways

The second and third Pyramids have relatively simple internal chambers and passageway systems—the former having one principal chamber just below ground level, positioned centrally under the apex of the monument, the latter having three main chambers, cut a little more deeply into the bedrock but again positioned centrally under the apex of the monument. The entrances to both Pyramids are in their north faces and take the form of cramped passageways sloping downwards at an angle of 26 degrees, before levelling off to join horizontal corridors under the monument.

The internal structure of the Great Pyramid, by contrast, is much more complex, with an elaborate arrangement of passageways and galleries—sloping up and down again at 26 degrees—and with three principal internal chambers. Of these latter only one, the ‘Subterranean Chamber’, is below ground level. The other two—the so-called ‘Queen’s Chamber’ and ‘King’s Chamber’—are both located in the heart of the monument’s superstructure at substantial altitudes above the ground.

The layout of these internal features is best appreciated from the diagram printed on page 45. Chief amongst them, surmounted only by Davison’s Chamber (and above that by the four so-called ‘relieving chambers’ which contain the ‘quarry marks’ mentioned earlier) is the—rectangular red-granite room, now famous as the ‘King’s Chamber’. It proved to be completely devoid of either treasures or inscriptions, or the body of a king, when it was first entered by Calif Al Mamoun in the ninth century AD. Measuring 34 feet 4 inches in length, 17 feet 2 inches in width, and 19 feet 1 inch in height it is located about 150 feet vertically above the base of the Pyramid. Its many mysteries are too well known to require further elucidation here (and, besides, have been described in some detail in our earlier publications
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).

8. Principal internal features of the Great Pyramid. The entrance in the north face known as ‘Mamoun’s Hole’ was forced by Arab explorers in the ninth century AD. At this time the exterior facing blocks of the Pyramid were still intact, hiding the true entrance from sight.

Connecting the King’s Chamber to the lower levels of the monument is the Grand Gallery, one of ‘the most celebrated architectural works which have survived from the Old Kingdom’.
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Sloping downwards at an angle of 26 degrees, it is an astonishing corbel-vaulted hall fully 153 feet in length and 7 feet in width at floor level. Its lofty ceiling, 28 feet above the visitor’s head, is just visible in the electric lighting with which the Pyramid has been equipped in modern times.

At the base of the Grand Gallery a horizontal passage, 3 feet 9 inches high and 127 feet long, runs due south into the ‘Queen’s Chamber’. Again found empty by Mamoun, this is a smaller room than the King’s Chamber, measuring 18 feet 10 inches from east to west and 17 feet 2 inches from north to south. Reaching a height of 20 feet 5 inches, the ceiling is gabled (whereas it is flat in the King’s Chamber) and there is a large corbelled niche of unknown function just south of the centre line in the east wall.

9. Detail of the corridors, chambers and shafts of the Great Pyramid.

Returning along the horizontal passageway to its junction with the base of the Grand Gallery the visitor will note, behind a modern iron grille, the narrow and uninviting mouth of the ‘Well-Shaft’—a near vertical tunnel, often less than 3 feet in diameter, that eventually joins up with the Descending Corridor, almost 100 feet below ground level. How the tunnelers, encysted in solid rock, were able to home in so accurately on their target remains a mystery. Mysterious, too, is the true function of all these odd systems of interconnecting ‘ducts’ which lead busily hither and thither inside the body of the monument, like the circuits of some great machine.

Sloping downwards from the Grand Gallery, and extending it in the direction of the ground at the continuing angle of 26 degrees, is another corridor. Known (from the point of view of those entering the Pyramid) as the Ascending Corridor, it measures 3 feet 11 inches high by 3 feet 5 inches wide and has a total length of just under 129 feet. Leaving the Pyramid, the visitor is obliged to ape-walk uncomfortably down the Ascending Corridor until the point where it joins up with ‘Mamoun’s Hole’—the tunnel that the Arabs cut for their forced entry in the ninth century—on the western side of two hulking red-granite ‘plugging blocks’ which mask the junction with the Descending Corridor. At the bottom of this 350-foot-long corridor, off limits to all but
bona fide
Egyptologists (and those willing to bribe the increasingly hard-pressed and demoralized Inspectors and
ghafirs
responsible for the day-to-day administration of Giza) is a truly remarkable feature—the Subterranean Chamber that nestles in solid bedrock more than 100 feet below the surface of the plateau (and almost 600 feet below the Pyramid’s lofty summit platform).

Inner space

The first thing that the intrepid visitor should do, after gaining access to the Descending Corridor, is to climb up it a few feet in the direction of the Pyramid’s true entrance. Now covered with an iron grille, this entrance is located in the monument’s north face, nine courses above and 24 feet to the east of ‘Mamoun’s Hole’ (through which all members of the public enter the Pyramid today).

Here, at the point in the ceiling of the Descending Corridor where the mouth of the Ascending Corridor was hewn upwards, it is possible to inspect the bottom end of the lowermost of the two plugging blocks. It is as firmly jammed in place today as it was when Mamoun’s diggers first encountered it in the ninth century, and it is easy to understand why its presence there encouraged them to tunnel round it into the softer limestone, seeking a way past the obstacle and into the upper reaches of whatever lay beyond.

Perhaps this was exactly what the Pyramid builders had ‘programmed’ those early explorers to do. After all, if you see that a huge chunk of granite has been hauled into place to block what is obviously an upwards-sloping corridor, then it is only human nature to try to get into that corridor—which Mamoun’s men did.

More than a thousand years later, tourists and archaeologists still follow the trail that those pioneering Arabs blazed around the plugging blocks into the main north-south axis of the Pyramid’s system of passageways. And though there have been all manner of hackings and tunnellings in search of further passageways (in the floors and walls of the King’s and Queen’s Chambers, for example), the plugs at the base of the Ascending Corridor have never subsequently been disturbed.

This is an understandable oversight if one is satisfied that the sole function of these plugs was to block the Ascending Corridor in a north-south direction. Why, however, has no one ever tried to find out if anything lies behind their
eastern
aspect?
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As well as having the same height and width as the Ascending Corridor, thus filling it completely, each of the plugs is about four feet in length—and thus easily long enough to conceal the entrance to a second and completely separate passageway system branching off at right angles towards the east.

There is certainly room for such a second system inside the Great Pyramid—and for much else besides. Indeed it has been calculated that as many as 3700 fully constructed chambers, each the size of the existing King’s Chamber could be accommodated within the monument’s vast ‘inner space’ of 8.5 million cubic feet.
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The stones of darkness and the shadow of death

Having examined the plugging blocks, the visitor is faced by a long climb down the full 350-foot length of the Descending Corridor, initially through masonry and thence into bedrock. As the journey proceeds, the rays of sunlight penetrating the barred entrance to the north grow progressively weaker and one has the sense of dropping like a deep-sea diver into the dark depths of a midnight-black ocean.

The corridor, which every intuition proclaims to be a remotely ancient, prehistoric feature, is 3 feet 11 inches high by 3 feet 6 inches wide and may originally have been cut into the 30-foot-tall rocky mound that occupied this site millennia before the Pyramid was built. It is unsettling, therefore, to discover that it is machine-age straight from top to bottom. According to Flinders Petrie, the variation along the whole passage ‘is under 1/4
inch in the sides and 3/10 inch on the roof’.
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In addition there is one segment of the corridor, 150 feet in length, where ‘the average error of straightness is only one fiftieth of an inch, an amazingly minute amount.’
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With hunched back, the visitor continues down this long, straight corridor sloping due south into the bedrock of the Giza plateau at the now familiar angle of 26 degrees. As ever greater depths are plumbed it is hard not to grow increasingly conscious of the tremendous mass of limestone that is piled above and of the heavy, dusty, unfresh fug of the subterranean air—like the exhalation of some cyclopean beast. Looking back apprehensively towards the entrance, one notices that the penetrating light has been reduced to a glimmering star-burst, high up and far away. And it is normal, at this point, to feel a concomitant glimmer of apprehension, a slight tug of anxiety at the extent of one’s separation from the world above.

10. The complex internal design of the Great Pyramid. It is possible that many other passageways and chambers remain to be discovered within the gigantic monument.

On the west side of the corridor, quite near the bottom, is an alcove, again covered by an iron grille, that gives access to the vertical Well-Shaft and thence to the Grand Gallery and the upper chambers. Soon afterwards the 20-degree descending slope levels off into a low horizontal passageway, running 29 feet from north to south, through which the visitor is obliged to crawl on all fours. Near the end of this passageway, again on the west side, is another alcove, 6 feet long and 3 feet deep, that has been roughly hewn out of the bedrock and that ends in a blind, unfinished wall. Then, after a further 4 feet of crawling, the horizontal passageway opens at a height of about 2 feet above floor level into the Subterranean Chamber.

Were it not for a single low-wattage electric bulb installed in modern times, the visitor would now be in complete darkness. The light that the bulb casts has a greenish, sepulchral hue, and what it reveals is a most peculiar room, considerably larger than the King’s Chamber, measuring 46 feet along its east-west axis, and 27 feet 1 inch from north to south, but with a maximum height of just 11 feet 6 inches.
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In the approximate centre of the floor, on the east side, is a railing surrounding a square pit reaching a depth of about 10 feet, and beyond that, penetrating the south wall, is a second horizontal corridor, 2 feet 4 inches square, running due south into the bedrock for a further 53 feet and terminating in a blank wall. Looking to the right, one notes that the floor of the western side of the Chamber rises up into a kind of chest-high platform. This has been irregularly trenched, creating four parallel ‘fins’ of limestone running east to west, almost touching the relatively flat roof at some points but with a clearance of up to six feet in others.