After the publicity surrounding the story of the discovery, nothing happened about the shaft or chamber until 1996, when a new — Egyptian — team was established to take the investigation further. This was to be led by a close friend of Zahi Hawass, a specialist in remote sensing (the use of satellite- or aircraft-borne technology to scan the Earth’s surface, or beneath it), an Egyptian geophysicist who worked for NASA on the Apollo moon landings named Dr Farouk El Baz. A Canadian company called Amtex became involved and equipment worth $1 million was flown to Giza. The intention at the time was to open Gantenbrink’s Door on live television, but nothing came of it.
8
In January 1998 Hawass promised that Gantenbrink’s Door would be opened by May of that year.
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Not only did this historic moment fail to materialise, but no explanation has ever been given for the non-event.
A particularly persuasive and persistent rumour has circulated that a tunnel was secretly being dug in order to reach ‘Gantenbrink’s Chamber’ from the lowest of the relieving chambers above the King’s Chamber, which is named ‘Davison’s Chamber’ after the British diplomat Nathaniel Davison, who officially discovered it in 1765, although there is some evidence that its existence was already known.
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(The other relieving chambers were discovered by Colonel Howard Vyse in 1837, who named them after prominent figures in contemporary British society, such as Wellington and Nelson.) Entry to Davison‘s’ Chamber is difficult: a somewhat inadequate wooden ladder is propped up against the 27-foot (8.7-metre) wall of the upper end of the Grand Gallery, but it stops short of the top. The last few feet have to be climbed using a rope, followed by an uncomfortable wriggle through the tunnel into the chamber itself. Davison’s, like all the relieving chambers, is only about 3 feet high and is obviously impossible to stand up in, with a rough and very uneven floor made of the granite roofing slabs of the King’s Chamber. Never intended to be seen, the builders took no trouble to make them smooth.
Was a tunnel really being dug southwards from Davison’s to Gantenbrink’s Chamber, as we had heard? Dozens of rumours concerning Egypt are circulating at any given time. Many of them emanate from people with only the slightest familiarity with concrete facts about Giza. The source of this particular rumour, though, was Thomas Danley, an acoustics engineer and NASA consultant for two space shuttle missions, who specialises in ‘acoustic levitation’ (raising objects through the use of sound and vibration). In October and November 1996, he participated in a project of the somewhat controversial Joseph M. Schor Foundation, together with a film crew led by American documentary producer Boris Said. They were going to perform acoustic experiments in the Great Pyramid on camera and had official permission to spend four nights there.
Given this golden opportunity, Danley and his team went up into Davison’s Chamber, where he noticed that a tunnel originally dug in the early nineteenth century seemed to have been reopened. The excavation was first made by Giovanni Battista Caviglia (1770-1845), one of the most unusual characters of nineteenth-century Egyptology. A ship’s captain from Genoa, he was also a Hermeticist and occultist. He became convinced that the pyramids contained great arcane secrets. He carried out major excavations all around Giza between 1816 and 1820, the first large-scale digs ever undertaken in that area.
Interestingly, Caviglia wanted to dig a tunnel from Davison’s Chamber to intersect the southern air shaft from the Queen’s Chamber because he thought that a hidden room would be found at that point.
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Astoundingly, Gantenbrink’s discovery in 1993 seems to have proved him right. Caviglia’s excavation was abandoned after they had tunnelled for only about 10 feet, probably because of the appalling conditions in which they had to work. The tunnel was subsequently refilled with rubble and largely forgotten. However, in November 1996 Danley crawled into it and found that it had recently been extended some 30 feet beyond the end of the original Caviglia tunnel - work that was obviously still in progress. He also found bags of rubble being stored in the upper relieving chambers. Danley showed this find to the Egyptian inspector assigned to accompany the team, and was disconcerted to discover that he knew nothing of any such tunnelling, though he agreed to report it to his superior - Zahi Hawass. Danley also reported what he had seen on the Internet and on American radio on his return from Giza.
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On a subsequent visit in February 1997, Danley saw that a new power cable now ran up the wall of the Grand Gallery and into the tunnel leading up to Davison’s Chamber, indicating that work was continuing up there out of sight. When we visited the Great Pyramid with Simon Cox in the spring of 1998, we saw for ourselves that a video camera had been installed at the top of the Grand Gallery, not pointing back down, as it would if intended merely to check on the upcoming tourists, but angled so that it would record anyone climbing up the ladder into Davison’s Chamber.
In July 1997, an American ‘independent Egyptologist’ named Larry Dean Hunter visited the pyramid to check Danley’s story. He was sent there by Richard Hoagland (most famous for his championing of the Face on Mars, and a major player in the unfolding story of our investigation).
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Hunter did not actually climb up into Davison’s Chamber, but photographed the cable, video camera and some canvas bags full of rubble at the top of the Grand Gallery. Strangely, all he came back with were photographs of those bags and a stray limestone chip, which could have come from anywhere. What he, and Hoagland, hoped to achieve by this is unclear, yet because of the publicity Hoagland generated for this non-story, it has actually eclipsed Thomas Danley’s first-hand account of ongoing work in Davison’s Chamber. (Curiously, Hoagland’s website posting makes no mention of Danley at all.)
Hunter also involved Mohammed Sherdy, assistant editor of the
El Wafd
newspaper. As Zahi Hawass denied that anything was going on in the relieving chambers apart from some ‘cleaning’ work, Hunter surmised that something was seriously amiss. Either work was going on that the authorities knew nothing about, or the authorities did know and were covering it up. But, in a meeting with Hunter and Sherdy in his office in July 1997, Hawass produced a faxed letter from film-maker Boris Said - who had been in charge of Danley’s team - denying any knowledge of the situation.
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Sherdy later said that he had been allowed access to Davison’s Chamber — but reported that he saw no tunnel.
Nothing at Giza is simple. In an interview in January 1998, Said confirmed that a ‘new tunnel’ was being dug from Davison’s Chamber, but added — somewhat confusingly — that he saw nothing sinister in that, although he stopped short of offering any explanation of its purpose. He also said: ‘They [the Egyptians] are tunnelling all over the plateau.’
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Many would ask why the Egyptians should not be digging - secretly or openly - at Giza? It is their land and their heritage, not a colony of the West. Few foreigners would object if they excavated beneath other Egyptian landmarks, such as the great Citadel, built by Saladin, which overlooks Cairo. The problem is that the monuments of ancient Egypt are acknowledged as belonging to the whole world: even President Hosni Mubarak said as much in print in 1998.
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Anything that happens at any of the ancient sites - Karnak, Luxor or Giza — must be made known internationally as soon as possible according to an unwritten agreement. Ancient Egypt belongs to everyone, and every time anyone seriously stirs its dust, we should all know about it: this is the general understanding that underpins all excavations and major discoveries. Where notable finds are concerned, Egyptology is a common currency that transcends politics, so evidence of secret tunnelling, not just in any ancient site, but in the Great Pyramid itself is of colossal significance.
In March 1997 — several months after Danley’s report — Hawass stated categorically: ‘There is no secret work at Giza!’.
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The only conclusion was, in our view, that someone was, to say the least, being economical with the truth about a major archaeological irregularity.
In February 1998 our colleague Simon Cox had seen unambiguous evidence of the existence of an unofficial tunnel. In fact, Simon, using the well-known Egyptian lubricant of
baksheesh
to grease relevant palms, had actually managed to enter Davison’s Chamber itself. There he saw - and photographed - final confirmation that there is indeed a tunnel being dug into the southern wall of the chamber. From Simon’s account it appears that Caviglia’s tunnel has been reopened and extended further into the heart of the pyramid. Excitingly, if it continues in a straight line and on the same level, it will intersect the southern shaft from the Queen’s Chamber. In other words it will strike approximately at the level of Gantenbrink’s Door. Is this what ‘they’ are up to — covertly investigating the mysterious door and what lies behind it? It is very suggestive, considering that the Egyptian authorities have officially dismissed Gantenbrink’s Door as unworthy of examination, pointing out that it is very small — about the size of an A4 piece of paper - and even, curiously, suggesting that nothing lies behind it. But do they, in fact, protest too much?
Secrets in the sand
While we were at Giza we found out for ourselves the difficulty of making public any exciting discoveries. We heard — from particularly reputable sources - that three new chambers had already been discovered in the Great Pyramid, around the King’s Chamber.
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Yet because for various reasons we could not reveal those sources, the news was technically worthless. And in any case, there is always a need for caution when dealing with activity at Giza. Wild rumours spring up like mushrooms overnight, describing exotic secret finds by the authorities that will — by now a standard implication of all such tales - somehow trigger miraculous changes in the world.
It seems that a search for hidden chambers in the Giza complex has been continuing for at least twenty-five years. One of the first twentieth-century attempts to find undiscovered chambers took place in Khafra’s Pyramid in 1968, with a project led by Nobel prizewinning physicist Luis Alvarez, who tried to locate chambers by measuring the passage of cosmic waves through the stone structure. (Alvarez was also the originator of the ‘deep impact’ theory of dinosaur extinction, and in the early 1950s, part of a CIA-backed study into Unidentified Flying Objects.
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) The 1968 Giza project involved twelve US and Egyptian agencies, including the US Atomic Energy Commission, the Smithsonian Institute and Cairo’s Ain Shams University. Initial computer analysis of the resulting data at Ain Shams led their project leader, Dr Amr Goneid, to state (as reported in
The Times)
that the results ‘defy all known laws of physics’ and that ‘there is some force that defies the laws of science at work in the pyramid’.
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But once again the confusion machine seems to have gone into overdrive: Alvarez subsequently announced from America that nothing untoward had happened, and that no new chambers had been detected.
The next phase of this project concerned the Sphinx. The idea that something highly significant is under the Sphinx has been around for centuries. During Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt - which included scholars as well as soldiers - it is said that they actually found a doorway in the Sphinx’s chest in 1801, but, because of the imminent arrival of the enemy, had to beat a hasty retreat before it could be explored. We know about the story of the French finding the door in the Sphinx because Arabs who were present described it to the nineteenth-century French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette. It has been argued that this door was actually the Sphinx Stela, but this is unlikely as the stone plaque is not flush with the surface of the Sphinx like a door.
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Many of the most noted Egyptologists of the nineteenth century firmly believed in the existence of chambers underneath the Sphinx. Mariette himself believed that a tomb lay beneath it. This was largely based on the observation that every time the ancient Egyptians depicted the Sphinx in stone carvings or on papyrus, they showed it lying on a plinth above what appears to be a tomblike chamber.
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Interest in the possibility of the existence of such a chamber revived in the early twentieth century. In 1926 the French archaeologist Emile Baraize undertook excavations in both the body of the Sphinx and the surrounding enclosure. The rough-and-ready haste of his excavations suggests that he may have been specifically looking for something, not merely excavating for its own sake in the normal cautious manner. Indeed, he appears to have succeeded at least partly in his aim, finding a tunnel accessed by a hole in the Sphinx’s rump. He explored it, then sealed it up, but, incredibly, kept the news of this amazing discovery to himself. This particular location, as we have seen, interested both psychic H.C. Randall-Stevens and AMORC. They — and, later, Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock — pin-pointed the area immediately beneath the Sphinx’s hindquarters as the location of one of the putative secret chambers. What is peculiar about Baraize’s work is that, although he excavated that site extensively for eleven years, not one of his many detailed reports or papers has ever been published.
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Following Baraize, there was a long gap until 1973 when the lead was taken by an intriguing organisation called SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute) from California. One of the world’s largest scientific research organisations, SRI has always enjoyed close links with the US Department of Defense and the intelligence community. It made three expeditions to Giza in the 1970s, two led by a physicist, the wonderfully named Dr Lambert Dolphin Jr, primarily to search for hidden chambers beneath the Sphinx. Why this idea suddenly resurfaced after fifty years of inactivity is unknown. According to Dolphin, the first SRI expedition in 1973 was, in fact, a continuation of Luis Alvarez’s project of five years before.
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