nimals, fruit and flowers--with
tremendous ceremony.

It is a longish ride before we alight again, and leaving the donkeys
under a slight straw shelter penetrate into the fastnesses of the hills.

How many of these rock-tombs were made here will probably never be
known, but year by year more are uncovered. The first we step into is
like a large well-lighted cave cut out of a cliff-side, from it opens
another cave-like room, and from that another, each sloping downward and
the whole series giving the impression of a series of puzzle-boxes
fitting into one another and then drawn out. The walls are covered with
pictures, paintings on plaster, not outline pictures like those we saw
in the temples, but filled in with blue and green, orange and
terra-cotta, laid on thickly, and as fresh as the day they were done.
Ever descending we pass on until we reach the last chamber, where the
great sarcophagus or coffin of the king was placed right up against the
face of the rock. The sarcophagus might be a mighty block of granite,
enclosing a wooden case, and that again another case, probably carved
and gilt, and finally, as a kernel, there was the body of the king,
preserved and dried by spices, lying awaiting the final resurrection.
The Egyptians believed in a future world, but they could not imagine a
future world without there being human bodies in it such as we have now,
so they took infinite trouble in preserving the dead body that it might
be ready for its time of call. Most of the sarcophagi from these tombs
have been removed and taken to the museum at Cairo, but in one to which
we penetrate, hewn out at a slope so steep that we have difficulty in
keeping our feet as we slither down, the mummy has been replaced and is
left uncovered.

Lit up by electric light we see King Amenhetep II., with his skin
blackened to a parchment, drawn tightly over his chiselled aristocratic
features. In the dome-shaped forehead, the Roman nose, and the tightly
compressed lips there is an expression of infinite disdain, as if he, in
his time the mightiest ruler in the world and the leader of
civilisation, knew that now he was exposed to the gaze of a party of
outer barbarians whose national histories were but of mushroom growth.
This king struck terror into the hearts of his enemies; he raided the
land of Syria, slew seven chiefs with his own hand and brought them back
to Thebes, hanging head downward from the bows of his boat!

The very day aft