CAIRO, September 17 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A tiny robot's electronic eye peered through a stone slab in a narrow tunnel deep inside Egypt's Great Pyramid Tuesday, September 17, 2002, only to find a small space and another obstacle beyond, disappointing but intriguing watching archeologists.

Braced for the possibility that they might find nothing at all behind the slab, scientists hoped to find statues or scrolls that could contain clues as to how the 4,500 year-old pyramid of Cheops was built.

The tank-like robot, with treads on top and bottom, crawled along a narrow, soaring shaft emanating from a chamber in the pyramid and inserted a fiber-optic camera through a hole it drilled in a "stone door" at the end.

However, hopes of unlocking the secrets of the Pharaohs hit an obstacle on the other side, where there was only a small empty space blocked by stone.

"I'm really happy that we did this. We found another space. We have found another sealed chamber," Zahi Hawas, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told a National Geographic television journalist as they stood deep inside the pyramid, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Egyptian and foreign journalists, who could only watch the event on a screen set up in a luxury hotel overlooking the floodlit pyramids on the desert plateau outside Cairo, let out a collective groan of disappointment.

An Egyptian antiquities official said the hole in the "stone door," which had copper handles, had been drilled on Saturday, September 14. He added the stone found beyond it was "cracked," but may conceal nothing more.

The robot, dubbed "Pyramid Rover," probed more than 200 feet (60 meters) upward along one of the shafts of the so-called Queen's Chamber.

No one knows the purpose and destination of these shafts, which measure no more than eight inches (20 centimeters) by eight inches, though Hawas and others theorize they were to serve the ascending soul of the deceased king.

The burial chamber of Cheops, a pharaoh who reigned before 25OO BC, has never been found.

The shafts were discovered and opened by Waynman Dixon in 1872.

The robot's mission was financed by the U.S. National Geographic Channel, which teamed up with Fox Television to broadcast the event live to the United States and other countries.

National Geographic will air the event on its own channel later.

In 1993, a German archaeologist sent a small robotic probe into the shaft armed with a fiber-optic camera.

It traveled for about 60 meters before it ran straight into the thick limestone door that has now been pierced.

Meanwhile, the National Geographic showed Hawas prying open overnight a sarcophagus found in June near the Giza pyramids. Inside was a skeleton, including the intact skull of what Hawas said was that of a man.

But apart from those remains, some of which appeared to be broken, there was nothing else that could be seen inside the limestone coffin that Hawas says belongs to the chief supervisor of the area where the pyramid builders lived.

The sarcophagus was found two kilometers (one mile) south of the Sphinx, in a tomb made up of five vaults.

"This sarcophagus could be one of the oldest intact sarcophagi ever found," Hawas said at the time.