This post spotlights the third and final act of The Golden Ellipse’s alternate-history Prologue detailing Napoleon’s legendary night in the Great Pyramid. It introduces Armand Dreyfus, a fictitious French archeologist who performs a pivotal role as Napoleon’s learned yet reluctant guide through the pyramid’s dark narrow passages toward the King’s Chamber.
Weaving this integral subplot into the book’s overarching narrative through to a paranormal flashback sequence in Chapter 9, where we meet Dreyfus once more proved challenging. However, giving voice to such an iconic historical figure like Napoleon and writing the dialog between the unlikely duo was incredibly fun. I have to say, Armand Dreyfus has a small role in the book, yet he is one of my favorite characters. Please don’t tell the others. 😀
– John Hopkins
Did Napoleon Spend a Night in the Pyramid?
The Great Pyramid’s endless font of myths and urban legends range from outrageous and far-fetched to somewhat plausible, depending on the audience. For example, myriad tales identify historical figures—including none other than Alexander the Great—entering the King’s Chamber’s precision-cut red granite confines. For power-seekers and the curious, transcendental expectations of insurmountable power and glory remained the only draw. That must be true because a lack of physical treasure was common knowledge. Whether the vaunted Macedonian ruler or a host of others endured an hour, let alone a whole night within the King’s Chamber, remains lost to time.
By contrast, the historical record recounts Napoleon’s triumphant appearance on the Giza Plateau in rich detail. In July 1798, following his crushing defeat of the Egyptian army at the Battle of the Pyramids. [1] The victorious French Expeditionary Force, accompanied by archeologists and astronomers to lexicographers, architects, doctors, and engineers, studied the exotic new world bound to its antiquated past and previously unexplored by the civilized Western world. Chief among the discoveries made on the French expedition was the Rosetta Stone and a new subject of study, Egyptology.
What lies as a matter of conjecture is whether Napoleon spent time alone inside the King’s Chamber. And if so, what did he experience in the dark confining space? While steeped in legend with no tangible proof beyond the fact that it makes a damn good story, some historians maintain Napoleon did indeed spend a night inside the chamber. And as the story goes, the experience shook him to his diminutive core. So much so, the mercurial dictator refused to speak about the ordeal until at death’s door. At the end of his long and illustrious life, the rumor goes the dying man considered divulging the story of his night in the pyramid to a close friend but reconsidered: “What’s the use. You would never believe me.”
Perhaps Napoleon’s ignominious future was laid out before him in a stunning vision during his time inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. Near the apex of a heretofore successful life, the little dictator’s fortunes waned soon after that, spiraling on a disastrous course toward his Waterloo moment and a solitary death in exile. [2,3]
References
- Chatsam, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
- http://www.gizapyramid.com/history.htm
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/inside-the-great-pyramid-75164298/
