ming, angry, tigerish in color.
Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer, more
amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of the
sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from tomb to
tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great galleries beneath
the sands, creeping through tubes of stone, crouching almost on hands
and knees in the sultry chambers of the dead, the awfulness of the
passing away of dynasties and of race comes, like a cloud, upon your
spirit. But this cloud lifts and floats from you in the cheerful tomb of
Thi, that royal councillor, that scribe and confidant, whose life must
have been passed in a round of serene activities, amid a sneering,
though doubtless admiring, population.

Into this tomb of white, vivacious figures, gay almost, though never
wholly frivolous--for these men were full of purpose, full of an ardor
that seduces even where it seems grotesque--I took with me a child of
ten called Ali, from the village of Kafiah; and as I looked from him
to the walls around us, rather than the passing away of the races,
I realized the persistence of type. For everywhere I saw the face of
little Ali, with every feature exactly reproduced. Here he was bending
over a sacrifice, leading a sacred bull, feeding geese from a cup,
roasting a chicken, pulling a boat, carpentering, polishing, conducting
a monkey for a walk, or merely sitting bolt upright and sneering. There
were lines of little Alis with their hands held to their breasts, their
faces in profile, their knees rigid, in the happy tomb of Thi; but he
glanced at them unheeding, did not recognize his ancestors. And he did
not care to penetrate into the tombs of Mera and Meri-Ra-ankh, into
the Serapeum and the Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Perhaps he was right. The
Serapeum is grand in its vastness, with its long and high galleries and
its mighty vaults containing the huge granite sarcophagi of the sacred
bulls of Apis; Mera, red and white, welcomes you from an elevated niche
benignly; Ptah-hotep, priest of the fifth dynasty, receives you, seated
at a table that resembles a rake with long, yellow teeth standing on its
handle, and drinking stiffly a cup of wine. You see upon the wall near
by, with sympathy, a patient being plied by a naked and evidently an
unyielding physician with medicine from a jar that might have been
visited by Morgiana, a musician playing upon an instrument like a huge