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207 laborers, but members of the royal family and high priests, were trapped alive. With the pyramid's plans still available, rescue teams tunneled their way up, reached the Grand Gallery, and save the dignitaries. This theory (as well as a long-discarded one about grave robbers digging their way up) falters, among other points, on the matter of precision. With the exception of segment C, which was tunnele through the masonry in a rough and irregular manner, and section G, two of whose squarish sides were left rough and not quite hori- zontal, all the other segments are straight, precise, carefully fin- ished, and uniformly angled throughout their lengths. Why woul rescue workers (or grave robbers) waste time to achieve perfection and precision? Why would they bother to smooth the sides, when such smoothness made climbing the shaft much more difficult? As the evidence mounted that no Pharaoh had ever been burie or enshrined within the Great Pyramid, a new theory gained adher- ents: The Well Shaft was cut to enable an examination of fissures that had developed in the rock as a result of an earthquake. The most articulate proponents of such a theory were the brothers John and Morton Edgar (The Great Pyramid Passages and Chambers), who, motivated by a religious zeal which saw in the pyramid an ex- pression in stone of biblical prophecies, visited, cleared, exam- ined, measured, and photographed every known part of the pyramid. They showed conclusively that the upper short horizontal passage to the Well Shaft (A), as well as the uppermost vertical sec- tion (B), were part and parcel of the original construction of the pyramid (Fig. 69). They also found that the lower vertical section (D) was carefully built with masonry blocks as it passed through a cavity (nicknamed The Grotto) in the bedrock (Fig. 70); it could have been so constructed only when the rock face was still ex- posed, before the Grotto was covered up with the masonry of the pyramid. In other words, this section, too, had to be part—a very early part—of the original construction of the pyramid. As the pyramid was rising above its base—so the Edgars theo- rized—a massive earthquake fissured the bedrock in several places. Needing to know the extent of the damage to determine whether the pyramid could still rise above the cracked bedrock, the builders cut through the rock segments E and F as Inspection Shafts. Finding the damage not too serious, the pyramid's construction continued; but to allow periodic inspection, a short (about six-foot) passage (G) was tunneled from the Descending Passage to connect with section F, al- lowing entry into the Inspection Shafts from below. The Prisoner in the Pyramid