16 March 2000 (morning, continued)

After buying our Great Pyramid tickets we wander, waiting for the first rush of tourists to hit it and clear out. It’s a hazy day and there’s a brisk wind from the north. There are so many deep pits in the rock around the pyramid, I feel like I’m walking on Swiss cheese.

The Great Pyramid is dated to 2551 BC and attributed to King Khufu, also known by the Greek version of his name, “Cheops.”

According to my guidebook, it has a base of over 13 acres, was originally 481 feet tall (the tippy top is now missing), and has over two million blocks of stone that weigh, on average, two-and-a-half tons each.

Ironically, the only known likeness of Khufu is a 3-inch-high ivory figurine found at Abydos, showing him dressed in a simple robe and the red crown, sitting on a throne with his right arm crossed over his chest, a flail in his hand.

Like other Egyptian pyramids, the Great Pyramid was surrounded by the ritual structures needed to complete a first-rate funerary complex, including temples and a nice “members only” court cemetery out on the back forty. But it is the interior passages and chambers that have become a sort of giant, three-dimensional Rorschach test through the years. Most people view it as a tomb, but there are those who have seen it as a cosmic clock, Joseph’s granary, a resurrection machine, a code for unlocking biblical secrets, an astronomical observatory, and a massive hydraulic pump.

To get inside the Great Pyramid we climb stone steps on the outside to a 9th century Arab explorer’s tunnel. The original entrance is exposed several courses above us and a little to the left. It is astonishing on its own, protected by enormous stone beams set in a stress-relieving peak.

Female guards at the entrance take tickets and check cameras (allowed, but a separate charge). After passing through the tunnel we come to a spot where, if we climb down a few steps, we can see the descending passageway that connects the original entrance to the subterranean chamber. We don’t go that way, however, but climb the ascending passage that leads to the Grand Gallery.

From the top of the ascending passage we can go straight (actually down slightly and then straight) to the “Queen’s Chamber” (a likely misnomer), or up through the Grand Gallery to the burial chamber. We go up first.

The Grand Gallery is a mystery within a mystery, and theories about its purpose run the gamut from it being a stone block storage area to it being part of a counterweight system for lifting the impossibly heavy granite burial chamber blocks. In many ways it’s no different from the corbelled chambers we saw in the Meidum and Red pyramids, but like everything else in this pyramid the scale overwhelms. The Gallery is well-lit, but even so the ceiling is in shadow and I feel like an ant in the elevator shaft of a skyscraper.

At the top of the Gallery we must stoop to get through a low, granite-lined passage to the burial chamber.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The burial chamber is as big as our house. Our house is admittedly smallish, but still… There is a ventilation fan rumbling in one of the “air shafts.” Its noise is intense and a bit unnerving. The sarcophagus rests at one end of the chamber — lidless, battered, and empty. It seems out-of-place, somehow — too small compared to the chamber and the pyramid itself. There is a recording thermo-hygrometer on a stand against the wall near the entrance and a security camera up in a corner, trained on the sarcophagus. Those who check the pyramid’s condition are also keeping an eye on cracks in the ceiling slabs and have placed strips that will alert to any signs of shifting.

 

Back out in the Grand Gallery, Bill points out to us, high above our heads, the opening that leads to the relieving chambers over the burial chamber. It would take a very long ladder to get up to it.

 

 

At the bottom of the Grand Gallery we duck-walk through a passage to the Queen’s Chamber. The Queen’s Chamber was never finished and has an uneven floor. There is a niche at one end, although that word hardly does it justice because, like everything else in this pyramid, it’s big. It was burrowed into by treasure hunters and the hole they left behind is gated over. It was in the southern “air shaft” of this chamber that the robot camera discovered the “door” with copper pins.

After leaving the Queen’s Chamber, we go back to the area where steps lead down to the original descending passageway. The gate is still open, but one of the female camera police is shooing people away. She gets distracted for a moment, however, and in an impulsive moment of lawlessness I dash down and arrive at a spot where I can look back up to the original entrance and see sunlight shining around the edges of the steel door that covers it, and also some of the granite sealing plugs. I would love to go back and contemplate in detail all the things we’ve seen, but it’s starting to get crowded and so we must move along. We emerge to a fine view of the bus parking area.