The Southern Shaft of the Queens Chamber.

The southern "air-shaft" or "ventillation-shaft" of the Queens Chamber has created more controversy in Egyptological circles than anything else in the history of this science. And it still continues to generate contrtoversy - below I have tried to explain the background of its discovery, and the potential epoch-making ramifications of future investigations.

When the Queens Chamber was first entered by Al Mamoon and his men, the existance of the Queens Chamber shafts were completely unknown. It was in 1872 that British explorer Waynman Dixon, his curiosity aroused by the shafts in the Kings Chamber, decided to look for similar features in the Queens Chamber. He located the shaftts, which had been sealed at the Queens Chamber ends by 5 inches of mortar. Like the Kings Chamber shafts, they proceed into the walls horizontally for a short distance, then ascend up into the body of the pyramid at an angle - but unlike the Kings Chamber shatfs, they do NOT exit the superstructure of the pyramid. So the first question was - what was their purpose? One thing was for sure - they couldn't possibly be for "ventillation".

Since the discovery of these shafts, crude attempts have been made to explore them, but due to the technology of the time, they only extended to long pieces of metal/wood being probed up the shafts in order to dislodge anything that was in the near vicinity. In fact, some of these attempts actually left debris in the shatfs which broke off the probing instruments.

It wasn't until 1993 when a german robotics engineer, Rudolph Gantenbrink, was contrtacted in to explore the Kings Chamber's shatfs with a view to installing a fan in one of these (which you can see in the Kings Chamber section), that the mystery of the Queens Chamber's southern shaft really came to the fore. When he had finished his work on the Kings Chamber shafts, Gantenbrink was given free rein to explore the Queens Chamber shafts with his robot, Upuaut II (named after the Egyptian for "Opener of the Ways"), and he set to work on the southern shaft of the Queens Chamber.

Finally, after Upuaut II had acscended 200 feet up the southern shaft, the walls and floor of the shaft became a lot smoother, and the robot's tiny camera broadcast the images of the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow - what looked like a stone "door" in the shaft, fitted with 2 (corroded) copper "handles". This amazing discovery, however, remains uninvestigated to the full, because of a number of reasons -

- Firstly, the existance of any chamber beyond the "door" in this shaft would run contrtary to standard Egyptological thinking, insofar as the pyramids were "tombs", and thus should not contain any hidden chambers - especially  none up a passageway that is too small to admit a human.

- Secondly, the main person responsible for the allocation of resources to the investigation of archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Dr Zahi Hawass, has made it clear that he considers this anomaly in the southern shaft to be of little importance, and therefore not worthy of investigation in the near future.

So as far as modern science is concerned, this door has yet been penetrated, and what lies beyond is still a mystery. All I can say is this - if the builders of the pyramid have taken so much trouble to create an enigma as well-disguised as this - there HAS TO BE something of immense importance concealed therein, and we as modern forward-thinkers searching for the truth, would do ourselves a great injustice by not attempting to find out what this door is concealing.