Cleopatra by H. Rider Haggard

We stood within a small arched chamber, paved and lined with great blocks of the granite stone of Syene. There before us -- hewn from a single mass of basalt shaped like a wooden house and resting on a sphinx with a face of gold -- was the sarcophagus of the Divine Menkau-ra.

We stood and gazed in awe, for the weight of the silence and the solemnity of that holy place seemed to crush us. Above us, cubit over cubit in its mighty measure, the pyramid towered up to heaven and was kissed of the night air. But we were deep in the bowels of the rock beneath its base. We were alone with the dead, whose rest we were about to break; and no sound of the murmuring air, and no sight of life came to dull the awful edge of solitude. I gazed on the sarcophagus; its heavy lid had been lifted and rested at its side, and around it the dust of ages had gathered thick.