utterly indifferent to whose tomb I am in. And
here is Badger inquiring about lunch, and teasing
our Arab guide in bad French.

"I say, guide, nous voulons manger—lunch,
you know. Now, I do hope you brought the
corkscrew. Aimez-vous bottled porter, or did
the Prophet forbid it?—le Prophète n'aimait
pas le port and sherry, c'est vrai?"

"Sayib" (good), tolls out the Arab guide.

"Quite Egyptian!" says the critical Badger,
as he looks about him with an air of delight and
astonishment, the hot wax dripping on his hand,
and occasioning him moments of extreme pain
and excitement. The guide bears these
transient sufferings with that Christian patience
with which we generally contrive to bear the
misfortunes of others.

"But it hurts, you know," was Badger's
remonstrance, which he instantly stopped to
pat and encourage the guide, and entreat him "not
to hurry, my dear fellow. Let's do everything
deliberately and comfortably."

To which the guide, thinking Badger was
asking him the name of the tomb, always replied,
with the air of an authority,

"Number seventeen—Belzoni tomb."

The two staircases, the three doorways, and a
third passage of twenty-nine feet, brought us to
a small oblong chamber, where the pit is, that
once baffled all further progress. The pit, a
kind of moat hollowed out to guard death from
life; a pit whose inner wall, strong apparently
as a fortress, and shaped of blocks of hewn
stone cemented close as cabinet work, barred all
further hope of discovery. The cunning of the
builder, dead now some three thousand years,
had well guarded the secret. The stone on the
walls was covered with columns of hieroglyphics
in due sequence. There was no flaw for curiosity
or suspicion to work in its crowbar. Yet at the
first grasp of Belzoni the whole magic of the
dead Pharaoh fell to pieces. The hollow sound
of the wall of the pit had caught his quick ear,
a small aperture no bigger than a scorpion could
wriggle through had caught his quick eye; the
battering-ram was launched, and the great
painted halls and the alabaster sarcophagus met
his delighted glance.

But it was the Arab hunters for treasures
and the gropers in the mummy-pit who had
given him the first inkling. They had been
struck, after the rains, by seeing at one particular
spot in the Bab-el-Molook the earth always
sink and shrink. Belzoni, whose whole mind
was bent on discovery, accepted the omen, and
began to dig, instantly discovering the first
staircase and doorway.

It is quite a tour through this, subterranean
palace of the dead; for one has no sooner
penetrated the first passages and hall, twenty-six
feet square, supported by four rock pillars, than
we come to a second hall, two more passages,
and a grand hall, supported by six pillars, at
the upper end of which is the vaulted chamber
where the sarcophagus was found. Nor is this
all: for two more rooms, supported by pillars,
lead out of the grand hall, and in some of
them are niches and recesses, intended for we
know not what incense-burning or mummy-
storing; and round the south-west room is a
broad bench of rock, four feet high, hewn out
for who shall say what mourner or visitor to
the royal tomb. Some think that the royal
attendants were laid here after death, ready to
serve with dish and goblet, sword and javelin,
harp and lute, on the monarch if he should call
them.

But the pit and the masking wall were not
the only means the wily Egyptians took to
conceal their dead monarch. No jealous banker
during a siege ever so built up his treasure.
The wall near which the sarcophagus stood was
again only a veil; it had an inclined plane forming
the central rib of a palatial staircase that
led down into outer darkness, more than fifteen
hundred and fifty feet. Whither it led and
what was the object of its concealment we
cannot at this period of time even guess.
Did these pyramid builders really believe
that all this scooping and tunnelling would
in time lead them a secret and covered way
to Hades?

In some of the rooms, the hieroglyphics are
still unfinished; the figures are red-lined and
corrected in black either by the artist himself
or his superior, and still remain waiting for the
relievo-cutter's chisel. The king must have
died and wanted his tomb before it could be
got ready for him, so the red living men were
turned out, and death came in and took possession.
I own, though no sentimentalist or
inventor of causes for grief, that I could not help
pitying the proud man who, after all, never got
his death-chamber finished, but was walled up,
hugger-mugger, anyhow, some great contractor
of those days smiling at the false priest as he hid
the slovenly job from the truth-telling daylight.
A thousand years or so later, and the trick
was discovered; but the rascals had fled, and
had lain down, let us hope in turn, in their
own unfinished tomb, and shuffled off the
responsibility.

I sometimes found myself moralising, too,
over the evidently greater carelessness and
haste with which (true to human nature) the
inner chambers were adorned. The outer
passages begin all line and level, red feet, green
water plants, blue ploughs, and so on; further
in, the workmen, tired, restless, or careless,
launch out into coarser figures; rooms full of
red men in white tunics holding tow-ropes, and
dragging in the mystic boat that bears the
mummy-case; blue gods crowned with
symbolical feathers; enormous snakes thirty yards
long; genii witli monster heads, all dashed in
with a very free and indifferent hand. It looks
very much as if the artists of the time had,
like modern upholsterers, tried to get their
contract work done as soon as possible, and with
no very vigilant or conscientious eye to watch
them.

"Would to Amun!"—the Lord of the Sun—
no doubt they said in those days, like any other
tired mechanics—"and by Tharah"—the god of