Excerpt from Mystery Cave of Many Faces
By Russell Burrows 1992
Pages 166 - 167
On my next trip in, I took along a small two-and-a-half-ton hydro-jack as well as a crank-type "come-along." I was determined to find out what was on the other side of that stone wheel. After some experimental rigging of my tools I soon figured out how to roll the stone away from the doorway it covered.
Anyone would expect that by this time, after all I had been through, I wouldn't be surprised or shocked anymore. But believe me the room that was exposed when the stone was rolled away beat everything else I'd seen in the cave. I stood looking at a huge stone sarcophagus, a stone box or vault with a solid stone lid on it. The sarcophagus was located in the center of a very elaborately decorated room, cut out of stone like the others. It looked as if this room was lined in marble slabs, and both the walls and ceiling were beautifully carved. Only an expert or many expert stone carvers could have done such beautiful work.
As I looked up at that beautiful ceiling, I was stunned by what I saw in a recess cut into the walls, where the wall panel ended and the ceiling began. Statues! All standing in a row, all around the room.
The statues are all the same except for their heads - some are animal, some are human. All are about twelve inches high. The left foot, each and every one, is forward as is the left arm, the hand of which is holding a staff.
There are just far too many other items to be seen in the crypt to describe them all from memory, but there are bronze weapons, and jars, many, many, jars.
I next turned my attention to the huge stone rectangular sarcophagus in the center of the room. It is about eight feet in length and something like three and a half to four feet wide and stands maybe four feet high, top to bottom.
Using a wrecking bar I was able to pry the stone lid up and slide it off. I expected to find human remains and had my mind all set for it, but I was not quite ready for the sight I beheld. There again was the gleam of gold, lots of it. It was the likeness of a person, all in gold, apparently the likeness of the person inside the coffin.
Needless to say the lid of that gold coffin had to be removed, and inside I found decaying cloth. I began to rummage around in that cloth at the head end of the coffin and discovered, underneath it, a death mask. This scared me a little, as I recalled Tut's curse and what had actually been the fates of those who found his tomb. Whoever this man was, or these people were, it all seemed very Egyptian. I closed the thing up in a hurry and got out of there, and haven't been back since.
In my previous descriptions I have said that a mummy is reposing in that casket. That was a mistake. I don't really know that it is a mummy. It looks like a mummy to me but, in all honesty, I must say that I cannot state that for certain.