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THE SECRET OF THE PYRAMID 63
son of Cheops who was the successor of his uncle Khafre. This
pyramid is about 72 m high and has a base side length of 108 m.
At first glance it seems that it was built with a 30-cm foot, but
precise measurements show that the unit used was the foot of
0.301835 m—a unit of length that could be more than 10,000
years old and was used also in the valley of the Indus River in
Pakistan.
Measured with that foot, the Menkure Pyramid also corresponds
exactly to the sacred triangle proportions and is about 22
per cent in surface and 11 per cent in volume of the Great Pyramid.
Why did Menkure build such a modest pyramid? Legends tell
us that he wanted to be the "king of * the people" and was
disgusted by the luxury and cruelty 6f both his father and his
uncle. To show the difference, he chose a small foot as standard
for his monument instead of the royal cubit and picked a unit of
length that was very ancient and half-forgotten. Menkure died
very young after a reign of only eighteen years and it was probably
his son Shepseskaf who finished the pyramid. The lower part
is clad in red granite, and since the outer covering of pyramids
was always done starting from the top while all the working
ramps and scaffoldings were still in place, the bottom was the
last part added to the Pyramid of Menkure, after his death.
Both the Khafre and Menkure pyramids are so perfect in their
simple mathematical proportions that nobody seemed to pay
much attention to them until one of the world's most prominent
nuclear physicists, the 1968 Nobel prize winner professor Luis
W. Alvarez, of Berkeley, CaKfornia, proposed to use cosmic rays
to find the hidden passages and secret chambers that everybody
hoped to find in the two smaller pyramids. His plan looked very
promising. Cosmic rays, discovered in 1911 by the Austrian physicist
Victor Hess, would show a higher intensity if they encountered
hollow passages on their way through the pyramids, and
those changes would be registered by the most modern devices
and analyzed by computer.
Alvarez had the full co-operation of the Egyptian government.
He had all the equipment he could dream of, and the archaeological
fraternity was positive Alvarez would solve the secrets