Word: chephren
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...sunbaked Giza Plateau on Cairo's outskirts, the pyramids look from a distance as though they have hardly aged in the more than 4 1/2 millenniums since they were built. But up close they look anything but eternal. Rubble and rock dust crumbling from the pyramid of Chephren have accumulated in piles on its lower levels. In the pyramid of Cheops, encrustations of salt, left by the evaporation of brackish groundwater, have eaten away at the walls of the burial chamber. The Sphinx, a few hundred feet away from the pyramids, has lost a 600-lb. chunk from its right...
...Chephren's Secret. It is not by chance that the pyramid probe will begin with Cheops; most, if not all, of its chambers and corridors have been found, and scientists will be able to check the efficacy of the cosmic-ray technique by comparing their findings with known locations of cavities within the pyramid. By May, if the Alvarez technique checks out, they will move the spark chamber to the nearby Second Pyramid or Pyramid of Chephren...
...Alvarez hopes they are there, awaiting only the arrival of his spark chamber to be found. "After a boyhood spent watching his father's workers erecting a beautiful and complex series of chambers and passages in the Great Pyramid," he asks, "would Chephren be content to erect a solid and uninteresting pile of limestone blocks as his own pyramid...
...Chephren's Secret...
...source of this effulgence--or, more prosaically, the man who bequeathed his thrillers and shockers to Harvard--was George Andrew Reisner '89, an eminent: Egyptologist who won fame by "solving the mystery of the Sphinx." (He showed that its head is a portrait of Chephren, a fourth-century Pharaoh who built the second Pyramid.) Born Nov.5, 1867, in Indianapolis, Reisner was graduated from the College summa cumlaude and then earned a Ph.D. here in Semitic Languages...