Memphis who fashioned the world upon his
forming-wheel—"would that this accursed
king's tomb were finished, and we were once
more up, safe, all day basking in the sunshine!
Why should a dead king bury us with his
forgotten mummy? Accursed then be these Nile
geese, and doubly accursed these big snakes
and these funeral boats!"

There is one thing very repulsive in Egyptian
tombs and temples generally. There is such a
sickening recurrence of exulting cruelty, such
lopping and binding, such flocks of haltered
prisoners tied to chariots; there are such tons of
human ears and hands; such slicing of heads,
such brandishing of swords like crumb-brushes,
and of falchions like fish-slices. Pride and cruelty
reign triumphant over these places. These kings
surely forgot that they were mere paid upper
servants of the nation, bound for certain wages
—trinkets, guards, and gilt houses—under
heavy penalties to discharge certain duties,
and originally chosen by the voice of the great
majority. By-and-by they usurped God's place,
fancied themselves divinely gifted with
incompetence, claimed priestly power so as to
at once enslave mind as well as body, and built
such vain tombs as these wherein to hide
themselves from decay. And now it comes to
this, that the place is a dry river-bed of loose
stone, and the jackal feeds her young in its
recesses.

Here my reveries were disturbed by a
tremendous crackling blaze suddenly springing
up from a fire of dry palm-boughs, set alight by
the guide, and contradicting all I had said. The
bright yellow flame, chasing the darkness, flashed
up to the roof. On all sides, coloured figures
moved and marched; men towing with snake-
ropes, genii, jackal, and ape-headed judges of
the dead; especially the funeral boats passing
over novitiatory and metaphorical cataracts,
were visible. The ceiling, too, was alive with
huge figures of goddesses, whose heads were on
this side of the room, and their legs, thirty feet
long, were on the opposite side of the wall, so
that, bracket-like, they embraced all between
and beneath them. For endless centuries that
divine bracket had straddled over the alabaster
sarcophagus of King Sethi.

For a moment the faces of Badger and the
guide shone out white and dark like good and
evil genii. In an instant the flames had died
into red sparks, and all was again darkness.
The vultures, the lutes, the papyri, the ploughs,
the bread-cakes, the geese, had disappeared; the
great negro hand of night had come and sponged
out the great coloured picture-book.

With this tomb I will couple Bruce's tomb—
or the Harper's tomb, as it is called—because
it is more domestic and sociable, and less
mysterious, awful, and hieratic. The rooms are mere
small furnished sitting-rooms, and their subjects
refer more to ordinary life and every-day events.
It is a reign or two later than that of Belzoni.
It was defaced during the reign of the Ptolemys,
for these tombs were even then show-places, and
the granite sarcophagus was removed some years
since. The giant's coffin is no longer here to
excite the imagination, or to dream of in future
Nilotic nightmares.

The chief features of this tomb of Ramesis
the Third (date 1219 B.C.) are the little side
bins, or chambers, which line either side of the
entrance passage. Each of these contains a
mummy pit, in which once rested the body of
some chief servant of the dead Pharaoh. His
chief cook, his head butler, his head baker, his
steward, harper, priest, armour-bearer, boat-
superintendent, farmer, ready at his call. They
lie right and left of the passage, each in his
separate stall, surrounded by picture emblems
of their different professions and trades rudely
painted on the wall. We see from these, how
the head Pharaoh ate, drank, and dressed. It
seems childish to lie down in the grave
surrounded by such shadows. That we brought
nothing into this world and can carry nothing
out of it seems to have been forgotten by these
worshippers of Amoun-Rehund; yet it was,
perhaps, some comfort to weak man to feel that
he would even in death be surrounded by
semblances of his life's delights.

Be it as it may, the boatman's vault has
its square-chequered sails and little paddles,
its cabins and banks of oars; the armourer his
brackets of bows, swords, arrows, and javelins,
his coats of mail, his embossed or gilded
helmets, his arms of gilt and steel. The cooks
slay oxen and dismember them, boil joints in
caldrons, mince meat, knead bread with their
feet and hands, draw off liquids with syphons,
carry unleavened cakes to the oven. The
husbandman carries geese, drives oxen, watches the
Nile rise, reaps the Doora for the lotus-flowers
for the festival. Another room is stored with
the semblance of furniture and wearables, of
wine-coolers resembling sarcophagi, sofas, chairs,
vases, striped linens, and leopard-skins. Another
room is piled with the still more fallacious
semblance of geese, quails, eggs, pomegranates,
grapes, nuts, &c.; and in the last room I
entered were two blind minstrels, playing before
some deity—Moni or Hercules, I believe the
antiquarians say—on harps, whose bases are
shaped into female heads.

There they play on, those harpers, nor does
wire or string fail after these three thousand
years of harping to deaf ears. There, like
treasure transformed by magic—that pictured
wealth of the dead—Pharaoh remains: no
human hand can lift down those javelins; no
sword wrench up those sarcophagi; no human
fingers draw those swords. Slowly, slowly,
time with gentle erasure fades them away,
and restores the blanched rock to its old
barbarity.

Badger, who has done nothing but utter
"Oh," "Ah!" and such interjections, and
declare everything is quite Egyptian, as it indeed
well may be—for what else could it be?—here
gets so mutinous on the subject of lunch, that I
proposed an adjournment to the mouth of the
tomb, there to discuss supplies. Badger thereupon
proposes that the guide, meantime, be