the most important, which the Egyptians called the Golden Hall."

Lord Evandale walked ahead, a few steps before the less agile scholar,
though perhaps the latter deferentially wished to leave the pleasure of
the discovery to the young nobleman.

As he was about to step across the threshold, Lord Evandale bent forward
as if something unexpected had struck him. Though accustomed not to
manifest his emotions, he was unable to repress a prolonged and
thoroughly British "Oh!" On the fine gray powder which covered the
ground showed very distinctly, with the imprint of the toes and the
great bone of the heel, the shape of a human foot,--the foot of the last
priest or the last friend who had withdrawn, fifteen hundred years
before Christ, after having paid the last honours to the dead. The dust,
which in Egypt is as eternal as granite, had moulded the print and
preserved it for more than thirty centuries, just as the hardened
diluvian mud has preserved the tracks of the animals which last
traversed it.

"See," said Evandale to Rumphius, "that human footprint which is
directed towards the exit from the hypogeum! In what narrow passage of
the Libyan chain rests the mummified body that made it?"

"Who knows?" replied the scholar. "In any case, that light print, which
a breath would have blown away, has lasted longer than empires, than
religions and monuments believed eternal. The noble dust of Alexander
was used perhaps to stop a bung-hole, as Hamlet says, but the footprint
of this unknown Egyptian remains on the threshold of a tomb."

Urged by a curiosity which did not allow them much time for
recollection, the nobleman and the doctor entered the hall, taking care,
nevertheless, not to efface the wondrous footprint. On entering, the
impassible Evandale felt a strange emotion; it seemed to him, as
Shakespeare says, that the time was out of joint. The feeling of modern
life vanished, he forgot Great Britain and his name inscribed on the
rolls of the peerage, his seat in Lincolnshire, his mansion in the West
End, Hyde Park, Piccadilly, the Queen's Drawing-Room, the Yacht
Squadron, and all that constituted his English existence. An invisible
hand had turned upside down the sand-glass of eternity, and the
centuries which had fallen one by one, like the hours, in the solitude
of the night, were falling once more. History was as if it were not:
Moses was living, Pharaoh was reigning, and he, Lord Evandale, felt
embarrassed becau