on. Now
the electric lamps would flash upon the gods supporting the ransacked
sarcophagus, lighting for a moment their grotesque forms; now the
attention would concentrate upon some wooden figure of a
hippopotamus-god or cow-headed deity; and now the light would bring into
prominence the great overthrown statue of the king. There is something
peculiarly sensational in the examining of a tomb which has not been
entered for such thousands of years, but it must be left to the
imaginative reader to infuse a touch of that feeling of the dramatic
into these words. It would be hopeless to attempt to put into writing
those impressions which go to make the entering of a great Egyptian
sepulchre so thrilling an experience: one cannot describe the silence,
the echoing steps, the dark shadows, the hot, breathless air; nor tell
of the sense of vast Time the penetrating of it which stirs one so
deeply.

The air was too bad to permit of our remaining long so deep in the
bowels of the earth; and we presently made our way through halls and
corridors back to the upper world, scrambling and crashing over the
_debris_, and squeezing ourselves through the rabbit-hole by which we
had entered. As we passed out of this hot, dark tomb into the brilliant
sunlight and the bracing north wind, the gloomy wreck of the place was
brought before the imagination with renewed force. The scattered bones,
the broken statues, the dead flowers, grouped themselves in the mind
into a picture of utter decay. In some of the tombs which have been
opened the freshness of the objects has caused one to exclaim at the
inaction of the years; but here, where vivid and well-preserved
wall-paintings looked down on a jumbled collection of smashed fragments
of wood and bones, one felt how hardly the Powers deal with the dead.
How far away seemed the great fight between Amon and Aton; how futile
the task which Horemheb accomplished so gloriously! It was all over and
forgotten, and one asked oneself what it mattered whether the way was
difficult or the battle slow to win. In the fourth year of the reign of
Horemheb a certain harper named Neferhotep partly composed a song which
was peculiarly appropriate to the tune which ran in one's head at the
opening of the tomb of this Pharaoh whom the harper served--

"(1.) Behold the dwellings of the dead. Their walls fall
down; their place is no more: they are as though they had
never existed. (2.) That which hath com