wasted away,[*] and
the whole frame thus remained intact, at least in appearance, while its
integrity ensured that of the soul.

* Such was the appearance of the bodies of Coptic monks of
the sixth, eighth, and ninth centuries, which I found in the
convent cemeteries of Contra-Syene, Taud, and Akhmim, right
in the midst of the desert.

An attempt was made by artificial means to reproduce the conservative
action of the sand, and, without mutilating the body, to secure at will
that incorruptibility without which the persistence of the soul was but
a useless prolongation of the death-agony. It was the god Anubis--the
jackal lord of sepulture--who was supposed to have made this discovery.
He cleansed the body of the viscera, those parts which most rapidly
decay, saturated it with salts and aromatic substances, protected it
first of all with the hide of a beast, and over this laid thick layers
of linen. The victory the god had thus gained over corruption was,
however, far from being a complete one. The bath in which the dead man
was immersed could not entirely preserve the softer parts of the body:
the chief portion of them was dissolved, and what remained after the
period of saturation was so desiccated that its bulk was seriously
diminished.

When any human being had been submitted to this process, he emerged from
it a mere skeleton, over which the skin remained tightly drawn: these
shrivelled limbs, sunken chest, grinning features, yellow and blackened
skin spotted by the efflorescence of the embalmer's salts, were not
the man himself, but rather a caricature of what he had been. As
nevertheless he was secure against immediate destruction, the Egyptians
described him as furnished with his shape; henceforth he had been purged
of all that was evil in him, and he could face with tolerable security
whatever awaited him in the future. The art of Anubis, transmitted to
the embalmers and employed by them from generation to generation,
had, by almost eliminating the corruptible part of the body without
destroying its outward appearance, arrested decay, if not for ever,
at least for an unlimited period of time. If there were hills at hand,
thither the mummied dead were still borne, partly from custom, partly
because the dryness of the air and of the soil offered them a further
chance of preservation. In districts of the Delta where the hills were
so distant as to make it very costly to reach them, advantage