o in."

The entrance to the verandah was from the end that faced the house,
and to gain it they passed under the boughs of a large magnolia-tree.
Going through glass doors that opened outwards into the verandah, Mrs.
Carr entered a room luxuriously furnished as a boudoir. This had
apparently no other exit, and Arthur was beginning to wonder where the
museum could be, when she took a tiny bramah key from her watch-chain,
and with it opened a door that was papered and painted to match the
wall exactly. He followed her, and found himself in a stone passage,
dimly lighted from above, and sloping downwards, that led to a doorway
graven in the rock, on the model of those to be seen at the entrance
of Egyptian temples.

"Now, Mr. Heigham," she said, flinging open another door, and stepping
forward, "you are about the enter 'The Hall of the Dead.'"

He went in, and a strange sight met his gaze. They were standing in
the centre of one side of a vast cave, that ran right and left at
right angles to the passage. The light poured into it in great rays
from skylights in the roof, and by it he could see that it was
hollowed out of the virgin rock, and measured some sixty feet or more
in length, by about forty wide, and thirty high. Down the length of
each side of the great chamber ran a line of six polished sphinxes,
which had been hewn out of the surrounding granite, on the model of
those at Carnac, whilst the walls were elaborately painted after the
fashion of an Egyptian sepulchre. Here Osiris held his dread tribunal
on the spirit of the departed; here the warrior sped onward in his
charging chariot; here the harper swept his sounding chords; and here,
again, crowned with lotus flowers, those whose corpses lay around held
their joyous festivals.

In the respective centres of each end of the stone chamber a colossus
towered in its silent and unearthly grandeur. That to the right was a
statue of Osiris, judge of the souls of the dead, seated on his
judgment-seat, and holding in his hand the source and the bent-headed
sceptre. Facing him at the other end of the hall was the effigy of the
mighty Ramses, his broad brow encircled by that kingly symbol which
few in the world's history have worn so proudly, and his noble
features impressing those who gaze upon them from age to age with a
sense of scornful power and melancholy calm, such as does not belong
to the countenance of the men of their own time. And all around, under
this sol