GRANDEUR OF DEATH: The Great Pyramid of Giza

This is civilisation's tallest tale of immortality. Told in stone, illuminated by sun, teased by sand and wind, it is man's most ambitious-and architecturally mystifying-project on death and afterlife. And on a sweltering September noon, the temperature hovering above 40 degrees Celsius, the dry air from western Sahara singing into the sandy, touristy rustle of the Giza plateau on the outskirts of Cairo, the tale, its narrative style a never-ending enigma, is an awesome silence soaring to the sky, as if the journey of millennia knows no destination except mystery. The Great Pyramid is the geometry of the great dead.

You reach this only existing member of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by surviving the chaotic traffic of Pyramids Road, or Al-Haram. The transition from picture postcard to reality is usually a letdown, but not so when you are at the foot of the tomb of King Khufu (also known by his Greek name of Cheops), the second pharaoh of the fourth dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom. As, elsewhere in the ancient world, the denizens of the Indus Valley excelled in ceramic designs and built citadels, the Mesopotamians raised magnificent cities and the Chinese flashed their silk, this king of Egypt lived (some 4,500 years ago) only to plan his own death-and the life after that. The Great Pyramid-tomb of the king-is his House of Soul, whose secrets are still beyond the reach of the most earnest connoisseurs of necrophilia, not to speak of tourists defined by camels, cameras, souvenirs, sunglasses, hats and bottled water. The secrets of the long dead continue to challenge the knowledge of the living.

TUNNEL VISION: Hawass shows the mysterious shaft

MISSION EGYPT Egypt: Secret Chambers Revealed, to be telecast on the National Geographic Channel on September 17 at 5.30 a.m. (repeat at 9 p.m.), will explore: « What treasures lie behind the limestone door that blocks the mysterious air shafts emanating from the Queen's Chamber in the Great Pyramid. « The opening of the coffin of the overseer of the pyramid workers inside his tomb. It is likely to reveal the world's oldest mummy. « More findings in the workers' village, one of the oldest cities in the world supporting a population of 20,000 that built the pyramid.

Still, the knowledge of the new century is trying its best to travel back in time to discover antique secrets. If the Old Kingdom of Egypt is a still visible, still unfolding civilisational marvel, though deformed by time, on the Nile, the Great Pyramid is the most mysterious farewell performance in stone. To unravel the buried mysteries in Khufu's tomb, science is not just reading hieroglyphs. Come September 16, the world will be taken to the deep recesses of the pyramid in a breathtaking (literally) archaeological effort by the National Geographic Channel. Egypt: Secret Chambers Revealed, the live-to-tape telecast, aspires to reveal in spectacular images what has remained unseen for 4,500 years-an archaeological adventure by man and machine. (In India the programme will be telecast on September 17 at 5.30 a.m., to be repeated at 9 p.m.)

This is the big riddle. In the ancient heart of the pyramid lies the Queen's Chamber, an unfinished room, one of the many chambers inside the four-faced tomb rising to 481 ft from the sandy expanse of Giza, the pointed summit a perceiving finger reaching out to infinity. From the chamber's north and south walls emanate two channels called air shafts, the mystery of whose mission is as old as the pyramid. Initially closed at both ends, they remained invisible till the late 19th century. In the early 1990s, a German archaeological team mounted the first investigation of the shafts with a custom-built robot. That exploration was waylaid by a bigger mystery: in the southern shaft, the robot couldn't go beyond 65 m. A limestone door with copper handles blocked further passage. Now, a more sophisticated robot-Pyramid Rover (see box)-is all set to penetrate the pharaoh's puzzling blocking stone to reveal more secrets from one of the world's greatest civilisations' deep, dark recesses.

REST IN PEACE: Lehner at the excavated city where workers demonstrate how pyramid builders slept in barracks

Buoyed by this whydunnit, you are getting ready to reach the Queen's Chamber, and to migrate from the burning brightness to the funereal darkness of an antique era you only have to climb a few steps from the foot of the pyramid. Suddenly you are transported into the open mouth of death's grandeur, and the journey thereafter is far from this worldly, as it has to be. You walk and you crawl through a corridor that descends to nowhere, for in the realm of death, stones are hardly tour guides, and no hieroglyphs are visible to tell you the way forward. Then, after a deceptive stopover in a space where you can stand straight, you are once again journeying up, and don't even think of what lies on either side of you, or in front of you. The spooky silence of the stones only exaggerates the morbid mystique of the tomb. You are not supposed to be inside it.

PYRAMID ROVER Designed and operated by iRobot, the Pyramid Rover measures 12 cm wide, has a height that varies from 11 cm to 28 cm, and is 30 cm long. It will be linked to the controller computer by a fibre optic cable and is exclusively designed for revealing the secrets in the shafts and behind the blocking stone. Special devices include lights that will penetrate darkness and high-resolution video cameras; echo-impact thickness gauge to measure the speed of sound through stone; a force gauge that will detect if the blocking stone moves and, if it does, in which direction when pressure is applied. A conductivity sensor will determine if the door handle's copper pins are connected on the reverse side of the stone. If there is a circuit, the length of the copper loop will be established by measuring electrical resistance. It has the world's smallest ground penetrating radar antenna, which images to a depth of one metre through solid concrete, and much deeper through more porous limestone. It will show what lies on the other side of the stone: treasures or the pharaoh's empty trick.

Somehow-it could not have been the triumph of the body but the spirit of the pharaoh-you are inside it: the Queen's Chamber, which, contrary to the pretence of the name, is a letdown. The king didn't bother, or lived enough, to make it queenly. This incomplete, unadorned, room is currently occupied by eager men and nameless machines, chief among them the uncrowned pharaoh of Egyptology, the stocky, silver-haired, imperious Dr Zahi Hawass, who is National Geographic's explorer-in-residence and the chairman of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, and the smarter explorer, the Pyramid Rover, which, now relaxing for the sake of visitors, looks like a twisted toy train. That mysterious southern shaft, measuring just 20 cm by 20 cm, seems to have been designed for the passage of soul, not body. There are many theories. For some, both are literally air shafts, but were closed for air or anything for a long time. Also, since the pharaohs were so paranoid about their life and belongings after death, open channels would have exposed the burial chambers to the outside world. The other theory is that they are star shafts, pointing to Sirius and Orion, as the layout of the three Giza pyramids (the other two are of Khufu's son and grandson) are in accordance with the position of the stars in the Orion constellation. But the shafts are bent, many times, to point to any one star.

So what are they? "I believe the Queen's Chamber was being built for the king, but the architect changed the plans and left it unfinished. It is possible that the southern shaft was intended as a symbolic passage for the spirit of the king to travel through to reach the solar boat (built with cedar wood and ropes and still preserved in a museum) that would take him to the Netherworld. He would take one boat for the onward journey and the other to return (re-enter the mummy)," says Hawass. The doctor should know. The discoverer of more than 234 Greco-Roman mummies at Egypt's Bhariya Oasis and the conservator of the Sphinx, Hawass lives his life only to make sense of the life of his civilisational ancestors.

What about the blocking stone in the southern shaft?

"The block of stone with copper handles could have been used to polish the other pyramid stones.It was probably left behind when the chamber was abandoned."

Hawass will be there on September 16, inside the chamber, to talk to you live in his authoritative Arabic accent, the moment the robot hits the stone, a moment that in every protagonist's mind will be a rendezvous between techno-savvy modernity and state-of-the-art civilisation.

A life among the dead. What a life, doctor.
"They are my perfume, friend."

The funereal fragrance of Egyptology exudes from every excavator in what was once Memphis, the capital of pharaonic Egypt, and today the centre where archaeology and anthropology meet to relive the life and times of civilisation builders.

The builders were not the larger-than-death pharaohs. More than four centuries before Christ, when Greek historian Herodotus visited the pyramids, he claimed they were built by slaves. He would be proved wrong. Imagine: 2.3 million limestone blocks, each weighing on average 2.5 tonne, one placed on another in perfect symmetry, each polished to gleam like a gargantuan jewel on sand-the work of 40,000 hands. There is-and was-no project to rivals this one in labour or imagination, in size or primeval science. Who built the pyramids and how did those men, ordinary Egyptians, live? To get idea, you have to crawl back to reality, your clumsy return journey mocked by royal spirits from their stony geometrical secrets.

On the southern expanse of the Sphinx-an oversized guardian with a man's face, nose badly mutilated, and lion's body-is what has come to be known as workers' cemetery, or workers' village, once home to 20.000 men who worked in shifts to build the pyramid. From a distance, it looks like a desert Monet's amateur impressionist work, a sandy canvas punctuated by tents and tombs. You follow Hawass, bouncing ahead in sand, his hat somehow intact despite the furious winds, whispering in a language of their own unknown stories from the buried texts of time. He stops at a stone gate, and depicted on the tomb's façade is a man sitting on a chair, his wig and beard short, and standing behind him is his wife in a body-hugging dress, holding his hands. The hieroglyphs reveal his identity-overseer of the administrative district-and rhapsodises the god of mortuary, Soker. Hawass takes you inside to show you his find: a sarcophagus, a huge limestone sealed with mortar, revealed in the torchlight switched on by the doctor. On September 16, the coffin will be opened, and Hawass is hopeful that the world will see the newest mummy-and the oldest. "The owner of this tomb wouldn't have had such a grand sarcophagus unless it was intended to hold his mummy."

The overseer's workers were not as privileged, but were not so badly off either. The film will feature new details of the workers' city, brought to life by American Egyptologist Mark Lehner. Standing on the sands that cover the remains of one of the oldest cities in the world, Lehner, who came to Egypt 30 years ago as a tourist and never left it as an academic passion, explains his discoveries: 1 m mud ramps believed to be bed platforms; galleries that were part of a complex containing shops and bakeries ("the workers drank beer, ate bread and fish"); streets and halls. "The sites of pyramids were also vast industrial complexes. A supporting population of 20,000-30,000 was housed and fed here. Ancient Egyptians must have created something like an urban centre to administrate the crowd." Maybe, as the saying goes, the pyramids built Egypt. And the National Geographic film, with a budget exceeding $1 million (Rs 4.8 crore), aspires to rebuild the secrets of the most secretive civilisation. " Something useless in this world is disproportionately useful in the eternal world," says John Bredar, producer of the film.

Secrets sealed in sands of time, and as your feet recede to the present, who knows you are trampling on camouflaged fantasies of those who lived only to celebrate death, whose grandeur now a vanishing point in the Cairo sky.