Turin has any very good ground for taunting an old Egyptian priest with
his cat-worship. If it is impossible to tell the difference betwixt a
cat which is simply a cat, and a cat which is a god, it is just as
impossible to tell the difference betwixt a bread-wafer which is simply
bread, and a bread-wafer which is the flesh and blood, the soul and
divinity, of Christ.

Seeing in Egypt the gods died, it will not surprise the reader that in
Egypt men should die. And there they lay, the brown sons and daughters
of Mizraim, side by side with their gods, wrapt with them in the same
stoney, dreamless slumber. One mummy struck me much. It lay in a stone
sarcophagus, the same in which the hands of wife or child mayhap had
placed it; and there it had slept on undisturbed through all the changes
and hubbub of four thousand years. Over the face was drawn a thin cloth,
through which the features could be seen not indistinctly. Now, thought
I, I shall hear all about old Egypt. Perhaps this man has seen Joseph,
or talked with Jacob, or witnessed the wonders of the exodus. Come, tell
me your name or profession, or some of the strange events of your
history. Did you don the mail-coat of the warrior, or the white robe of
the priest? Did you till the ground, and live on garlic; or were you
owner of a princely estate, and wont to sit on your house-top of
evenings, enjoying the delicious twilight, and the soft flow of the
Nile? Come now, tell me all. The door of a departed world seemed about
to open. I felt as if standing on its threshold, and looking in upon the
shadowy forms that peopled it. But ah! these lips spoke not. With the
Rosetta stone as the key, I could compel the granite slabs and the brown
worn parchments around me to give up their secrets. But where was the
key that could open that breast, and read the secrets locked up in it?

And this form had still a living owner! This awoke a train of thought
yet more solemn. Who, what, and where is he? Anxious as I had been to
have the door of that mysterious past in which he had lived opened to
me, I was yet more anxious to look into that more mysterious and awful
future into which he had gone. What had he seen and felt these four
thousand years? Did the ages seem long to him, or was it but as a few
days since he left the earth? I went close up to the dark curtain, but
there was no opening,--no chink by which I could see into the world
beyond. Will no kind hand draw the veil aside but