So large and heavy were some of them that it was a wonder to me how they could ever have been brought to this place, to which the only entrance was seemingly the narrow, tortuous stairway by which I had come.
At last I saw near one end of the crypt a great chain hanging.

Turning the light upward, I found that it depended from a ring set over a wide opening, evidently made artificially.

It must have been through this opening that the great sarcophagi had been lowered.
Directly underneath the hanging chain, which did not come closer to the ground than some eight or ten feet, was a huge tomb in the shape of a rectangular coffer or sarcophagus.

It was open, save for a huge sheet of thick glass which rested above it on two thick balks of dark oak, cut to exceeding smoothness, which lay across it, one at either end.

On the far side from where I stood each of these was joined to another oak plank, also cut smooth, which sloped gently to the rocky floor.