tails of iron discover the mystery of the kings chambers

'You'd never believe me.'Īs I say, the story is not true-Napoleon's private secretary, De Bourrienne, who was with him in Egypt, insists that he never went inside the tomb. 'Oh, what's the use,' he murmured, sinking back. Hauling himself painfully upright, he began to speak-only to halt almost immediately. Not until 23 years later, as he lay on his death bed, did the emperor at last consent to talk about his experience. Having ventured alone into the pyramid's forbidding interior and navigated its cramped passages armed with nothing but a guttering candle, Napoleon emerged the next morning white and shaken, and thenceforth refused to answer any questions about what had befallen him that night.

This chamber is generally acknowledged as the spot where Khufu, the most powerful ruler of Egypt's Old Kingdom (c.2690-2180 BC), was interred for all eternity, and it still contains the remains of Pharaoh's sarcophagus-a fractured mass of red stone that is said to ring like a bell when struck.

When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night alone inside the King's Chamber, the granite-lined vault that lies precisely in the center of the pyramid. There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid.

Tails of iron discover the mystery of the kings chambers