Read Online The Giza Power Plant by Christopher Dunn - Free Book Online

protect his offended nose, he forced himself into the fetid passage and struggled along in this manner for twenty-five feet until he came across a large chamber not quite high enough to stand in. Once inside this chamber, Davison cleared away bat dung and uncovered nine enormous granite beams measuring up to twenty-seven feet long and weighing up to seventy tons each. This monolithic ensemble formed the ceiling of the King's Chamber. Unlike the bottom and sides of the beams, though, the tops of them were rough-hewn with no pretension to straightness or accuracy. Davison also noticed that the ceiling of the chamber he had discovered was constructed with a similar row of granite beams. Davison could make little sense of these features, and his only satisfaction in his discovery was to carve his name on the wall and have the chamber named after himself.
    Additional exploration of Davison's Chamber came in 1836 when Colonel Howard-Vyse, with the help of civil engineer John Perring, made extensive explorations of the pyramid complex at Giza. In Davison's Chamber, Howard-Vyse noticed a crack between the beams of the ceiling. He perceived the existence of yet another chamber above the one he was occupying. Without obstruction, he was able to push a three-foot-long reed into the crack. Howard-Vyse and his helpers then made an attempt to cut through the granite to find out if there was indeed another chamber above. Finding out in short order that their hammers and hardened steel chisels were no match for the red granite, they resorted to using gunpowder. A local worker, his senses dulled by a supply of alcohol and hashish, set the charges and blasted away the rock until another chamber was revealed.
    This chamber held a mystery for the early explorers who entered its confines, a mystery that has baffled people for decades. The chamber was coated with a layer of black dust, which, upon analysis, turned out to be exuviae, or the cast-off shells and skins of insects. There were no living insects found in the Great Pyramid, which made this discovery even more mysterious. What prompted hordes of insects to single out this one sealed chamber and shed their skins? It is a mystery that has never been satisfactorily explained. In fact, there has not been any attempt to explain it, and because there is no logical answer that fits in with any previously proposed theory, no one has given it much attention.
    As in Davison's Chamber, a ceiling of monolithic granite beams spanned this new chamber, indicating to Howard-Vyse the possible existence of yet another chamber above. Blasting their way upward for three and a half months, to a height of forty feet, they discovered three more chambers, making a total of five. The topmost chamber had a gabled ceiling made of giant limestone blocks. Howard-Vyse surmised that the reason for the five superimposed chambers was to relieve the flat ceiling of the King's Chamber of the weight of thousands of tons of masonry above. Although most researchers who have followed have generally accepted this speculation, there are construction considerations that cast doubt on this theory and prove it to be incorrect.
    What Howard-Vyse and others have not considered is that there is a more efficient and less complicated technique in chamber construction elsewhereinside the Great Pyramid. The structural design of the Queen's Chamber negates the argument that the chambers overlaying the King's Chamber were designed to allow a flat ceiling. The load of masonry bearing down on the Queen's Chamber, which itself is situated below the King's Chamber, is greater than that above the King's Chamber. Yet the Queen's Chamber has a gabled ceiling, not a flat one. If a flat ceiling had been required for the Queen's Chamber, it would have been quite safe to span this room with one layer of beams similar to those above the King's Chamber. Both the King's Chamber and Queen's Chamber employ huge gabled blocks of limestone that transfer the