Despite its ancient appearance, the stairway was illuminated with lights that had been bolted into the walls. They must have had battery packs; I didn’t see any electrical wires. As we rounded a second bend I saw a large niche on my right and paused to peer into it. Inside it was a huge stone sarcophagus, its sides crammed with hieroglyphs and its top depicting the image of a feather-caped noble in a tall, ornate headdress. The lid of the sarcophagus was cracked, and didn’t sit properly on its base. I wondered how they’d gotten the thing down the narrow staircase. Maybe they’d constructed the building around it.