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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Chapter 37<br />

Made by Some God<br />

Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

I had climbed the Great Pyramid the night before, but as I approached it<br />

in the full glare of midday, I experienced no sense of triumph. On the<br />

contrary, standing at its base on the north side, I felt fly-sized and puny—<br />

an impermanent creature of flesh and blood confronted with the aweinspiring<br />

splendour of eternity. I had the impression that it might have<br />

been here for ever, ‘made by some god and set down bodily in the<br />

surrounding sand’, as the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus commented in<br />

the first century BC. 1 But which god had made it, if not the God-King<br />

Khufu whose name generations of Egyptians had associated with it?<br />

For the second time in twelve hours, I began to climb the monument.<br />

Up close in this light, indifferent to human chronologies and subject only<br />

to the slow erosive forces of geological time, it reared above me like a<br />

frowning, terrifying crag. Fortunately, I only had six courses to clamber<br />

over, assisted in places by modern steps, before reaching Ma’mun’s Hole,<br />

which now served as the pyramid’s principal entrance.<br />

The original entrance, still well-hidden in the ninth century when<br />

Ma’mun began tunnelling, was some ten courses higher, 55 feet above<br />

ground level and 24 feet east of the main north-south axis. Protected by<br />

giant limestone gables, it contained the mouth of the descending<br />

corridor, which led downwards at an angle of 26° 31’ 23”. Strangely,<br />

although itself measuring only some 3 feet 5 inches x 3 feet 11 inches,<br />

this corridor was sandwiched between roofing blocks 8 feet 6 inches<br />

thick and 12 feet wide and a flooring slab (known as the ‘Basement<br />

Sheet’) 2 feet 6 inches thick and 33 feet wide. 2<br />

Hidden structural features like these abounded in the Great Pyramid,<br />

manifesting both incredible complexity and apparent pointlessness.<br />

Nobody knew how blocks of this size had been successfully installed,<br />

neither did anybody know how they had been set so carefully in<br />

alignment with other blocks, or at such precise angles (because, as the<br />

reader may have realized, the 26° slope of the descending corridor was<br />

part of a deliberate and regular pattern). Nobody knew either why these<br />

things had been done.<br />

The Beacon<br />

Entering the pyramid through Ma’mun’s Hole did not feel right. It was like<br />

1 Diodorus Siculus, Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 217.<br />

2 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 88; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, pp. 30-1.<br />

305

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