The Step Pyramid at Saqqara, in the desert south of Cairo, is the oldest pyramid in Egypt and the model every later pyramid builder worked from. After roughly 4,600 years it is coming apart: looters have torn into its chambers, earthquakes have cracked its stone, and centuries of erosion have eaten away at its foundations. The film follows a joint British and Egyptian team five years into an emergency restoration project, working to stabilize the structure before more of it collapses. Cameras go inside the pyramid's internal galleries and burial shafts, showing the scale of the damage up close and the engineering problems it creates for anyone trying to shore up a monument this old without destroying what is left of the original construction. Interviews with the archaeologists and conservators on site lay out what has already been lost and what the race against time actually looks like day to day, from surveying unstable passageways to reinforcing walls that have held for four and a half millennia.