During the first few years of building, all problems in the work plan were ironed out. Where the men would live, how they would be fed, and who would make up the various work gangs or teams were all decided. Tremendous social organization was needed, but such issues had been figured out during the construction of
the earlier pyramids. While the bedrock was still exposed, masons began carving out the descending passageway that led to the underground burial chamber.
This chamber was to be used only if Khufu died during the first ten years of construction. Because the descending passage was never intended for heavy traffic—just the pharaoh’s sarcophagus—it is rather small, just large enough for one person to walk around or move in hunched over. It must have been carved by a single master stonemason, as there is no room for two people to work in it. Of all the chambers and passages in the Great Pyramid, it is the most precise. An engineering marvel, the exactly cut rectangular tunnel descends 230 feet, pointing due north and never deviating by more than a quarter of an inch. At the early stages of the Pyramid’s construction when the subterranean chamber was being carved out, this passage served as the highway that daily brought the workers to their jobs underground. Once the descending passage was completed, a team of workers began carving out the burial chamber. At first only one man, working at the end of the passage, could carve the beginnings of the subterranean chamber into the bedrock. Then, when there was room for a coworker, a second mason joined him and they chipped away at the limestone until the small chamber could accommodate a third worker, and so it went until a team of more than a dozen were working there. Just as in all excavated tombs, they began at the ceiling and excavated downward, assisted by gravity. If you carved a tomb from the bottom up, you would always have to swing your mallet upward and fight gravity.
The men who excavated the underground chamber didn’t need great skills. They were really just roughing out the twenty-six-byforty- three-foot room. As they worked and the chips accumulated, even less skilled workers carried the chips in baskets up the descending passage to the surface. Later, more skilled craftsmen could put the finishing touches on the king’s burial chamber. But the skilled craftsmen
were never needed. As the Pyramid progressed the pharaoh was clearly in good health. Hemienu could now move on toward a burial chamber high up in the Pyramid.