"Then perhaps you could enlighten us, Peter," Mills said coldly, for the first time visibly stung by the
younger man's criticisms. "Why do you think the pyramid was built?"
"I can't say for sure, of course." Peter rose to the challenge. "But I can make several suggestions.
First, the chalk/granite makeup: alternate layers of organic and inorganic material. Almost like a
gigantic storage battery. But what kind of energy would such a thing store?"
Peter's eyes were alight as he took off on one of his flights of fancy. Speculative archaeology, he
called it.
He'd continued, the words falling over themselves to get out: "Well, science has recently shown that
Earth energies do exist"—he cast a quick, knowing glance at his teacher—"despite most
archaeologists having denied it for years. There's piezoelectricity, generated by the grinding of quartz
rocks under the surface. On a small scale, Japanese scientists can now duplicate it in the lab, where it
manifests as plasmoid light.
"Then there's telluric energy, the flow of natural energy from points of varying resistance on the
earth's surface. Almost every sacred site ever found has stood on one of these flows—raising the
possibility they might once have formed a worldwide grid. And the magma mantle, deep in the earth's
crust, may have properties we can't even guess at."
Peter paused, noting the skepticism on the faces of his audience before plunging on with his theory.
"It's suspected that at least some of these energies are capable of interacting with electromagnetic
fields... such as those generated by the human brain."
"Phew, Peter!" Lorann Mutti, the youngest and prettiest of Mills's team, whistled. "That's some stretch
of the imagination you're calling for. How exactly do you think it affected humans?"
"Who knows?" Peter shrugged. "But if things like this pyramid were built to store the energies,
someone must have been able to use them. My guess is that the shamans, the tribal priests, somehow
used it to cause hallucinations in their people.
"Imagine the degree of control they'd have if, for instance, they could make people see a giant
representation of whatever gods they worshiped. Or maybe the shamans could directly access the
energies—which would explain how supposedly primitive tribesmen could move stones that weigh
tens, even hundreds, of tons."
"Interesting theories, Peter," Mills had observed, "but as you admit, not a shred of proof. And
definitely not the sort of thing to be preserved in the archaeological record. So we've no way of ever
knowing—"
"Yes, we have," Peter broke in. "If we can rediscover precisely how they harnessed the earth
energies, we can replicate anything they did."