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By Julian Websdale
The most celebrated pyramids are those at Giza, built during the fourth dynasty of Egypt, of which the largest is the one that housed the pharaoh Khufu, better known as Cheops. This is now called the Great Pyramid.
Some years ago it was visited by a French hardware store owner and author named Antoine Bovis. It is said that Bovis took refuge from the midday sun in the pharaoh’s chamber, which is situated in the centre of the pyramid, exactly one third of the way up the base. He found it unusually humid there, but what really surprised him were the garbage cans that contained, among the usual tourist litter, the bodies of a cat and some small desert animals that had wandered into the pyramid and died there. Despite the humidity, none of them had decayed but just dried out like mummies.
He began to wonder whether the pharaohs had really been so carefully embalmed by their subjects after all, or whether there was something about the pyramids themselves that preserved bodies in a mummified condition.
Bovis made an accurate scale model of the Cheops pyramid and placed it, like the original, with the base lines facing precisely north-south and east-west. Inside the model, one third of the way up, he put a dead cat. It became mummified, and he concluded that the pyramid promoted rapid dehydration. Reports of this discovery attracted the attention of Karel Drbal, a radio engineer in Prague, who repeated the experiment with several dead animals and concluded:
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