The Queen’s Chamber is a barren, 17-by-18-foot room, with a 20-foot-high gabled ceiling. Its only notable feature is a narrow ventilation shaft, the opening a mere eight-inch-by-nine-inch rectangle. This shaft, as well as the two found in the King’s Chamber, had remained sealed until 1993, when the Egyptians, seeking to improve the pyramid’s ventilation, hired the German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink to use his miniature robot to excavate the blocked ventilation shafts. Images taken by the robot’s miniature camera revealed the shafts were not blocked, but sealed from within by a sliding apparatus, a tiny door held in place with metal fittings. When unimpeded, the shaft would open directly to the sky.

Using a sophisticated clinometer, Gantenbrink was able to calculate the exact angles of projection to the night sky. At 39 degrees, 30 feet, the Queen’s southern shaft had been directly targeted on the star Sirius. The King’s shaft, at 45 degrees, on Al Nitak, the lowest star among the three situated on Orion’s belt.

Astronomers soon thereafter discovered that the three pyramids of Giza had been painstakingly aligned to mirror the three belt stars of the constellation of Orion as they appeared in 10,450 BC. (The legend of Osiris is also linked with Orion; his wife, Isis, with the star of Sirius.) Was cosmic alignment the true purpose behind the excavation of the shafts, or were they designed to fulfill another function?

The Grand Gallery is an incredible engineering accomplishment unto itself. Less than seven feet wide at floor level, the walls of this corbelled shaft gradually narrow along either side as they rise to meet the 28-foot-high ceiling. Climbing at a 26-degree incline, the tight passageway runs upward more than 150 feet, an amazing architectural accomplishment considering that the Gallery’s vaulted masonry supports the entire weight of the upper three-quarters of the pyramid.

At the summit of the Grand Gallery is a mysterious antechamber, its walls composed of red granite. Strange pairs of parallel grooves resembling tracks for an ancient set of partitions have been carved into the wall. From here, a small tunnel leads into the King’s Chamber, the most impressive room in the pyramid. The chamber is a perfect rectangle, 17 feet, 2 inches wide, 34 feet, 4 inches long, its ceiling rising 19 feet, 1 inch off the floor. The entire chamber is composed of 100 blocks of red granite, each weighing in excess of 70 tons!

How could the ancient builders possibly have managed to lift these granite blocks into place, especially in such confined spaces?

Only one object is present within the King’s Chamber, a solitary block of mud-colored granite, its interior sculpted out like a giant bathtub. Situated along the western wall, the piece is seven and a half feet long, its width and depth each measuring three and a half feet. The solid block of granite has been cut with unexplainable machinelike precision. Whatever technology was used to slice this object was superior to any tool possessed by modern man.