Be prepared to hunch over. The tour begins with the "Ascending Passage,” a cramped, steep, nearly 130-foot-long passageway. "You have to stoop over and climb up,” Kamrin says. But it could be worse. Before the ticket office started limiting the number of daily visitors in the late 1990s, humidity in this passage hit 80 percent.

A lot is off limits. As you make your way up the Ascending Passage, you’ll pass two passageways that are out-of-bounds for tourists: the Descending Passage and the path to the Queen’s Chamber. The former, a 300-foot descent into increasing darkness, leads to the “Unfinished Chamber,” the lowest of the pyramid’s three rooms. The latter leads to a chamber that, for centuries, has been misnamed: “We don’t think the queen was buried there,” Kamrin says. There are various theories why these two rooms exist. Our favorite: Khufu, the king for whom the Great Pyramid was built, couldn’t make up his mind where to be buried.

Take a break in the Grand Gallery. That's the room you'll enter when you emerge from the Ascending Passage. Kamrin is a fan of the limestone walls and the "corbelled ceiling," with rock slabs jutting out further and further as the walls ascend.

Artifacts are in short supply. The King’s Chamber, just past the end of the Grand Gallery, is your final destination. Unfortunately, the room was looted about 500 years ago, so Khufu’s body and all of his worldly possessions are nowhere to be found. “It’s very clean and simple,” Kamrin says. Khufu’s granite sarcophagus is still there, near the west wall, but it, like the rest of the room, is empty.

Take note of the small tunnels in the wall. Two eight-inch-wide, square tunnels run out of the walls in the King’s Chamber, going all the way to the open air outside the pyramid. Scholars once thought the tunnels were for ventilation. Now the theory is that they had a spiritual function. “They were for the king’s soul to leave the pyramid, and join various stars in the afterlife,” Kamrin says. Two similar tunnels were found in the Queen’s Chamber, but their purpose is still unclear. In 1992, National Geographic built small robots to explore the tunnels. Stone slabs blocked their way. “We don’t know what’s past [the stones], or why [the tunnels] were blocked off,” Kamrin says. “I’d say that’s a really big mystery right now.”

Sorry, no climbing allowed—for most of us. When you return outside, don’t even think about climbing up the side of the pyramid. We know, it’s tempting. And an actor in the Transformers movie did climb, but he had special authorization. “Guards would stop you immediately,” Kamrin says, laughing. “You need to have special permission—you have to be very important or have lots of money.” —Matthew Hill 

 Photo: The crew for Transformers had special permission to film at the pyramids.

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