A channel in the perfect floor leads down beneath it to the entrance, and I realise belatedly that Scipio—this is, or was, his house—must have had a new deck laid at what would be chest high over the old one to accommodate his prize. We’re walking on a rostrum, like a stage, and our footsteps echo beneath us. My mind, always helpful in bad situations, makes haste to conjure an image of Egyptian burial architecture, poisons and spiked pits and crocodiles lurking in the dark, smashing up through the floor to eat.