underground through his carelessness, or be hurried
homeward to our boat through his stealing them,
Badger, one of the best-natured souls in the
world, who always wants to do things in a cozy
straightforward way, and who has had very little
conversance with any people but his own
countrymen, takes the guide by the shoulders
and addresses him with honeyed words:

"Look here, my dear fellow, all we want is
to see the thing thoroughly, le too." (Here
Badger, who, like others of my compatriots,
believes that every one understands French,
wanders off into the French of Stratforde atte
Bowe.) "Do you understand? Let us go on
quietly, amicably, and—"

"Sayib" (good), says the Arab sulkily,
understanding not two words of all Badger's
harangue.

"Very well—descendez! Commencez vite!
Look alive—vous comprenez—you under-
stand?"

"Belzoni tomb, No. 17," says Homar Alee
oracularly.

The donkeys were picketed in the shade of a
rock—that is, one front leg of each was tied up
in the tranquillising Arab manner pirated by
Rarey. We got the short spermaceti candles
out of the saddle-bags and approached the
entrance of No. 17, which that extraordinary
runaway Pavian monk and street acrobat,
the gigantic Belzoni, ingenious discoverer of
Egyptian antiquities, ransacked with great
success.

At the foot of a brown bare cliff in this valley
of death is the square doorway of the tomb,
marked in red paint on the lintel by Champollion,
Bruce, and some other Egyptian traveller.

We are going to penetrate four hundred and
seventy feet horizontally into the deserted palace
of death, and one hundred and eighty feet
deeper than the head of the broken staircase
where I now stand, down to the chamber where
once rested that wonderful semi-transparent
alabaster sarcophagus which is now to be seen
in the Soane Museum, in Lincoln's Inn-fields,
London, England.

We descend the broken staircase, covered
with flakes and broken ledges of stone, that leads
to the real entrance to the tomb. Badger, in
the midst of the slippery and uncertain descent,
calls for Murray to find the date of the Italian's
discovery: which he cannot.

Another door and another passage of eighteen
feet long by nine wide, its roof blackened by
the torch-smoke of predecessors, the walls lined
with coloured hieroglyphics, bring us to another
shelving and fractured staircase, which
descends on an horizontal slant another twenty-
five feet.

We move with glimmering starry light over
the detritus and broken refuse of the false wall
that Belzoni's battering palm-tree destroyed in
laying open the true site of the monarch's
sarcophagus. There are chips of stone enough to
fill half a dozen masons' yards. Persian, Greek,
Turk, and Frenchman, have all lent their hands
to plunder, spoil, and demolish, the tomb of the
old Egyptian king. The guide shows you the
ruthless hollows at the base of the second staircase
where Champollion removed some specially
curious and beautiful groups. Other antiquarians
have imitated him with lamentable
success; others with lamentable failures—all have
helped to mar and mutilate this palace of King
Death.

Every wall is like the gigantic illuminated
leaf of a child's spelling-book, the colours still
perfect, the forms of the strange mystic
menagerie still entire. The water-plant, the rat, the
ibis, the wild goose, the jackal, the hare, the
hawk, the ape, the vulture, the asp with swollen
hood, the crocodile, the sycamore—all the plants
and creatures I have been for weeks in contact
with—cut into the stucco with strong, clear,
intelligent touch.

The colours—the greenish blues, the heavy
reds, the coarse yellows—though barbarous in
effect, untarnished by age. To many living,
these figures could now be read off as a
newspaper can be read. I know that this lute meant "pleasure," and this cross and ring "pure life,"
and this blue figure a god, and this red figure a
man, and this triple scourge "royal power," and
this asp sovereignty. But beyond this all is
darkness, except where readings in Egyptian
mythology enable me to see that here the Genii
of the Dead, headed by Horus, led the dead king
to Osiris and Athos; and that here the king, in
his descent to Amenti, to be tried for his life's
deeds, is ferried over the river of Death, or
makes offerings to Osiris, Isis, and Anubis. The
whole tomb is a great epic, the subject death;
yet it resembles a child's picture-book, painted
in crude and conventional colours, barbarous and
curious, but beautiful only to the over-heated
imagination. What a strange freak of pride to
provide this subterranean picture-book world to
spend the ages in, and to await the inevitable
spoiler! Had these Pharaohs pined for eternity
of peace, why did they not go and have their
graves dug deep in the moving desert, and where
none could have discovered them? Many a
peasant they spurned with their feet, as he cowered
amid the ashes of their brick-kilns, has slept for
three thousand years in his forgotten grave, while
the lord of the two Egypts has been torn piecemeal
by antiquarians to spice library drawers,
or has been dismembered by popular lecturers
searching for papyri.

Happy in my ignorance, as I dream over the
impotence of pride and the vanity of transitory
power, I grow so careless of the flattery and
emptiness of the hieroglyphic inscriptions, that
I would scarce read them now, if I could. It
might have been Sethi, or Osirei, father of
Sesostris, who, thirteen hundred and twenty-two
years before Christ, sire, I mean, of the
Eighteenth Dynasty of Theban Diospolites, who
drove out the stranger shepherd kings who
slumbered here in an alabaster chest; all I care
for is that it is the tomb of a bygone Egyptian
king, and that here am I, to whom Egyptian
history has been dear ever since I could read,