fine, gauze-like stuff,
and some gold work shone faintly through it as well.

The last wrapping taken off, the young woman showed in the chaste nudity
of her lovely form, preserving, in spite of so many centuries that had
passed away, the fulness of her contours, and the easy grace of her pure
lines. Her pose, an infrequent one in the case of mummies, was that of
the Venus of Medici, as if the embalmers had wished to save this
beautiful body from the set attitude of death and to soften the
inflexible rigidity of the cadaver.

A cry of admiration was uttered at the same time by Rumphius and
Evandale at the sight of the marvel. Never did a Greek or Roman statue
present a more beautiful appearance. The peculiar characteristics of
the Egyptian ideal gave indeed to this lovely body, so miraculously
preserved, a slenderness and a grace lacking in antique marbles,--the
long hands, the high-bred, narrow feet, the nails shining like agate,
the slender waist, the shape of the breasts, small and turned up like a
sandal beneath the veil which enveloped it, the slightly protruding
contour of the hip, the roundness of the thigh, the somewhat long leg
recalling the slender grace of the musicians and dancers represented on
the frescoes of funeral repasts in the Thebes hypogea. It was a shape
still childish in its gracefulness, yet possessing already all the
perfections of a woman which Egyptian art expresses with such tender
suavity, whether it paints the walls of the passages with a brush, or
whether it patiently carves the hard basalt.

As a general rule mummies which have been filled with bitumen and natron
resemble black simulacra carved in ebony; corruption cannot attack them,
but the appearance of life is wholly lacking; the bodies have not
returned to the dust whence they came, but they have been petrified in a
hideous shape, which one cannot contemplate without disgust and terror.
In this case, the body, carefully prepared by surer, longer, and more
costly processes, had preserved the elasticity of the flesh, the grain
of the skin, and almost its natural colour. The skin, of a light brown,
had the golden tint of a new Florentine bronze, and the amber, warm tone
which is admired in the paintings of Giorgione and Titian covered with a
smoky varnish, was not very different from what must have been the
complexion of the young Egyptian during her lifetime. She seemed to be
asleep rather than dead. The eyelids, still fringed with t