Unfortunately, the location of the ‘hinged trapdoor’ had been forgotten in the past few centuries and the gleaming limestone of the Pyramid offered no clue to its whereabouts. So he decided to break his way in by sheer force. The limestone casing proved impervious to chisels—days of work only produced shallow depressions. Al-Mamun decided on a cruder method—to build huge fires against the limestone, and then cool the red-hot surface with buckets of cold vinegar. The cracked limestone was then levered and battered out.
After tunnelling through eight feet of hard limestone, the workmen found themselves confronting the inner blocks of the Pyramid, which proved just as hard. It took months to tunnel a hundred feet into it, and by that time, Al-Mamun concluded that it was solid throughout and was about to give up when one of his workmen heard a dull thud coming from somewhere to the left. They changed direction, and finally broke into a narrow and low passage that seemed to have been made for dwarfs. On its floor lay a prism-shaped stone from the ceiling, which had made the thud.
They crawled up the slope, and finally discovered the original entrance to the Pyramid, ten courses above the entrance Al-Mamun had forced. It had cunningly been placed 24 feet left of centre, and was invisible behind huge limestone gables. Arab historians claim that the hinged stone—which required two men to move it—was still there—it vanished centuries later, when the limestone casing was purloined by builders.
Now they retraced their steps and crawled down the passage. This simply led them to Strabo’s ‘vermin-infested pit’, with an irregular (and obviously unfinished) floor. On the further side of this there was a low passage that ended in a blank wall. Clearly, this had been abandoned.
Again, luck favoured Mamun. The stone that had fallen from the ceiling revealed the end of a granite plug which looked as if it blocked a passage that sloped upward. This again proved too hard for their chisels, so Mamun told his men to cut into the softer limestone to the right of it. But when they came to the end of it, there was another plug, and at the end of that, yet another—each of the plugs about six feet long. Beyond this there was a passage blocked with a limestone plug, which they cut their way through with grim persistence. Beyond that there was another, then still another. The workmen were now eager, for they felt that whoever had taken so much trouble to block the passageway must certainly have concealed some marvellous treasure...
A long crawl up another low passageway finally led to a space where they could stand upright. Facing them was another low corridor—less than four feet high—that ran horizontally due south. They scrambled along this for more than a hundred feet, then found that the floor suddenly dropped in a two-foot step, enabling them at last to stand upright. But why a two-foot step at that point? The Pyramid would prove to be full of such absurd and arbitrary mysteries—so many that it is hardly surprising that, in later centuries, cranks would read profound significance into its strange measurements, such as detailed prophecies of the events of the next 5000 years.
Now Al-Mamun—who took care to go first—found himself standing in a rectangular room with plastered walls and a gabled roof, like a barn. It was completely bare and empty. In the east wall there was a tall niche that looked as if it had been carved for a large statue, but it was also empty. The floor was rough, and looked unfinished. Because the Arabs buried their women in tombs with gabled ceilings (and men in tombs with flat ceilings), Al-Mamun arbitrarily labelled this the Queen’s Chamber. But it contained no artefact—or anything else—to associate it with a woman. Bafflingly, the walls were encrusted with a half-inch layer of salt.
The measurements of the room were puzzling—although Al-Mamun was probably too chagrined at the lack of treasure to pay much attention to them. It was not quite square, which was odd, since the pyramid builders showed themselves obsessed with precision and accuracy, and the wall niche was slightly off-centre. In the nineteenth century another puzzle would become apparent when an explorer named Dixon, tapping the walls, noticed a hollow sound, and got a workman to cut into the wall with a chisel. This revealed an ‘air vent’ sloping upwards. Yet the air vent—and an identical one in the opposite wall—failed to reach the outside of the Pyramid. Why should the architect of the Pyramid build two ‘air vents’ that failed to reach the outside air, and then seal them off at the lower end so they were not visible? It sounds like Alice’s White Knight:
But I was thinking of a plan
To dye one’s whiskers green,
Then always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen.
Did these ancient builders have a sense of humour like Lewis Carroll?
There is another puzzle. The ‘Queen’s Chamber’ looks as if it was left unfinished. If so, then why did the workmen continue to construct the ‘air vents’ as they went on building upwards? Is the chamber part of some curious bluff?
Al-Mamun ordered his workmen to hack into the wall behind the niche, in case it was a secret doorway into another chamber, but after a few feet, gave up. Instead, they retraced their steps to the end of the horizontal passage, where they could stand upright, and raised their torches above their heads. They could now see that the level ‘step’ they were standing on had not always been there. The low ascending passage they had climbed had once continued upward in a straight line; this was proved by joist holes in the walls which had once supported it.
Standing on one another’s shoulders, they heaved themselves up the side of the ‘step’, and into the continuation of the ascending passage. As they held their torches aloft and saw what lay ahead, they must have gasped with astonishment. There was no longer a lack of headroom—the ceiling of this long ascending tunnel was far above them. And ahead of them, rising at the same angle as the ascending passage behind them (26 degrees), the tunnel ran up into the heart of the Pyramid. This marvellous structure would be christened the Grand Gallery.
This gallery, about seven feet wide at floor level, narrowed to about half this width at the ceiling, about 28 feet above. Against the wall on either side is a two-foot high step or ramp, so that the actual floor is a sunken channel or slot, just less than three and a half feet wide. Why there has to be a sunken channel between two low walls, instead of a flat floor, is another of those unsolved mysteries of the Pyramid.
A long scramble of 153 feet up the slippery limestone floor brought them to a huge stone higher than a man; the top of a doorway was visible behind it. When they had clambered over this, and down another short passageway, they found themselves in the room that was obviously the heart of the Pyramid. It was far larger than the 'Queen’s Chamber’ below, and beautifully constructed of red polished granite; the ceiling above them was more than three times the height of a man. This, obviously, was the King’s Chamber. Yet, except for an object like a red granite bathtub, it was completely empty.
Al-Mamun was baffled; his workmen were enraged. It was like some absurd joke—all this effort, to no purpose whatsoever. The ‘bathtub’—presumably a sarcophagus—was also empty, and had no lid. The walls were undecorated. Surely this had to be the antechamber to some other treasure chamber? They attacked the floor, and even hacked into the granite in one corner of the room. It was all to no avail. If the Pyramid was a tomb, it had been looted long ago.
Yet how was this possible? No one could have been in here before them. And the sheer bareness of the room, the lack of any debris or rubbish on the floor, suggested that there had never been any treasure, for robbers would have left
something
behind, if only useless fragments of their loot.
Oral tradition describes how Al-Mamun pacified the angry workmen by having treasure carried into the Pyramid at night, and then ‘discovered’ the next day and distributed among them. After that, Al-Mamun, puzzled and disappointed, returned to Baghdad, where he devoted the remaining twelve years of his reign to trying—entirely without success—to reconcile the Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. Like his father, he died when on campaign.
In 1220, the historian and physician Abdul Latif was one of the last to see the Pyramid still encased in limestone. Two years later much of Cairo was destroyed by a great earthquake, and the limestone—22 acres of it—was removed to rebuild the city’s public buildings. The ‘Grand Mosque’ is built almost entirely from the casing of the Pyramid. But it is a pity that the builders did not retain its inscriptions. Abdul Latif said that the hieroglyphics on its surface were so numerous that they would have occupied thousands of pages. In that case, we would presumably know the answer to the riddle of the Pyramid.
As it happened, Al-Mamun was wrong in believing that there was no other entrance to the Pyramid. It was
almost
rediscovered in 1638 by an English mathematician called John Greaves, who went out to Egypt armed with various measuring instruments. After struggling through a cloud of huge bats, and staggering out of the Queen’s Chamber because the stench of vermin made him retch, he made his way up the smooth ramp of the Grand Gallery, and surveyed the King’s Chamber with the same bafflement as Al-Mamun; it seemed incomprehensible that this vast structure should be built merely to house this red-granite room with its granite bathtub. On his way back down the Grand Gallery, just before it rejoined the narrow ascending passage, he noticed that a stone was missing from the ramp on one side. Peering down into the hole, he concluded that there was a kind of well that descended into the heart of the Pyramid. He even had the courage to lower himself into this well, and to descend about 60 feet—at which point it had been enlarged into a small grotto. He dropped a lighted torch into the continuation of the well, and realised that it came to an end when the torch lay flickering somewhere in the depths. But the fetid air and the presence of bats drove him out again. Back in England, his book
Pyramidographia
brought him celebrity, and an appointment as Professor of Astronomy at Oxford.
Two centuries later, an intrepid Italian sea captain—and student of the hermetic arts—named Giovanni Battista Caviglia gave up the sea to devote himself to the mystery of the Great Pyramid. Like Al-Mamun, he believed that there must be a secret room that would reveal why the Pyramid had been built.
In fact, a kind of ‘secret chamber’
had
been discovered in 1765 by an explorer named Nathaniel Davison, who had observed a curious echo at the top of the Grand Gallery, and raised a candle on two joined canes to look at the wall above him. At ceiling-level he had seen a hole in the wall, and investigated it with the aid of a shaky ladder. He crawled down a tunnel almost blocked with bat dung, and found himself in a ‘chamber’ that was only about three feet high, whose irregular floor was formed of the blocks that made the ceiling of the King’s Chamber, directly below it. But it proved to be quite empty.
In his search for a secret chamber, Caviglia paid a gang of workmen to dig a tunnel out of ‘Davison’s Chamber’, while he used the Chamber itself as a bedroom. It seems to have occurred to him that there might well be more hidden chambers
above
this one, but he lacked the resources to search for them. Instead, he decided to explore the mystery of the ‘well’. He went twice as far as John Greaves, but found the bottom blocked with rubble, and the air so fetid that his candle went out.
He tried removing the rubble by having his workmen pull it up in baskets; but they soon refused to work in such appalling conditions, choked with foul air and powdered bat dung. He tried clearing the air with burning sulphur, but since sulphur dioxide is a deadly poison, this only made it worse.
Caviglia returned to the descending passage that ran down to the ‘vermin-infested pit’ under the Pyramid. It was still full of limestone debris from the entrance cut by Al-Mamun’s workmen. Caviglia had this removed, and crawled on down the passage. The air was so foul and hot that he began to spit blood; but he pressed on. A hundred and fifty feet further down, he found a low doorway in the right-hand wall. When he smelt sulphur, he guessed that he had found the lower end of the well. His workmen began to try to clear the debris, and suddenly had to retreat as it fell down on them—bringing the basket they had left at the bottom of the well.
This
was the secret entrance to the heart of the Pyramid.
In a sense, this raised more problems than it solved. The obvious explanation was that the builders of the Pyramid had used it to escape after they had blocked the ascending passageway with granite plugs and so sealed the Pyramid. But that theory demanded that they should slide the granite plugs down the ascending passageway like pushing corks down the neck of a bottle; the sheer size and weight of the plugs would have made this impossible. It was far more sensible to assume that the plugs were inserted as the Pyramid was being built—in which case, the builders would not need an escape passage, because they could walk out via the still unfinished top.
The truth is that, where the pyramids are concerned, there are no absolute certainties: only certain established ideas that the ‘experts’ have agreed to accept because it is convenient to do so.
One of these established ideas is the ‘certainty’ that the Great Pyramid was built by a pharaoh called Cheops or Khufu. As a cautionary tale, it is worth telling how this particular ‘certainty’ came about.
In 1835, a British officer, Colonel Richard Howard-Vyse—according to one writer, ‘a trial to his family’, who were anxious to get rid of him
1
—came to Egypt and was bitten by the ‘discovery’ bug. He approached Caviglia, who was still exploring the Pyramid, and offered to fund his researches if Caviglia would give him credit as the co-discoverer of any major find; Caviglia rejected this.
In 1836 Howard-Vyse returned to Egypt and managed to obtain a
firman
—permission to excavate—from the Egyptian government. But, to Howard-Vyse’s disgust, this named the British Consul, Colonel Campbell, as a co-excavator, and Caviglia as supervisor. Howard-Vyse paid over a sum of money to finance the investigation, and went off on a sightseeing tour. When he returned, he was infuriated to find that Caviglia was looking for mummies in tombs instead of investigating the Great Pyramid for secret chambers, which is what Howard-Vyse wanted. Caviglia had told him that he suspected that there might be more hidden rooms above Davison’s Chamber.