Great Pyramid
It is one of the seven wonders of the world, but the precious objects the was built of to shelter for all eternity - the mummified remains of King Cheops or Khufu - have never been found, and are presumed to have been stolen by tomb robbers. Now, 4,500 years after it was completed, this semi-mythical structure may be about to reveal its greatest secret: the true resting place of the pharaoh. Using architectural analysis and ground-penetrating radar, two amateur French Egyptologists claim to have discovered a previously unknown corridor inside the pyramid. They believe it leads directly to Khufu's burial chamber, a room which - if it exists - is unlikely ever to have been violated, and probably still contains the king's remains. But Gilles Dormion, an architect, and Jean-Yves Verd,hurt, a retired property agent, have so far been refused permission by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities to follow up their findings and, they hope, prove the room's existence. "To do so, one would simply have to pass a fibre optic cable down through existing holes in the stone, to see if there are portcullis blocks in the corridor below," said Mr. Verd,hurt. "Then it will be necessary to enter the front part of the corridor and penetrate the room, taking all precautions to ensure that it is not contaminated." The portcullis blocks were large granite slabs that the ancient Egyptians lowered into the corridor leading to the king's funeral chamber, via a system of cords descending from above, to seal it after his burial. Until these procedures have been carried out, the two are at pains to stress that the room has not been discovered. However, they have been working in the pyramids for 20 years, and their radar analyses in another pyramid, at Meidum, led in 2000 to the discovery of two previously undetected rooms. One respected Egyptologist, Jean-Pierre Corteggiani, of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, was impressed by their work from the start. What first struck him, he said, was that the georadar images were collected and interpreted by a non-Egyptologist, Jean-Pierre Baron, of Safege, a French company that specialises in georadar. "This specialist works for a company, one of whose main projects is to lay out the future TGV [express train] route from Paris to Strasbourg," said Mr. Corteggiani. "If he says it is safe to lay the rails here, because there is no cavity under the ground here, he'd better be right. If not, the death toll will be very high."
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