wer.

The beauty and changefulness of that narrow valley by comparison with
the monotonous lands which flank it gave promise of a happy people.
Hemmed in on the west by the sand hills of Libya and on the east by the
equally bare, dry, never-changing hills of Arabia; teeming with people
as the channels of an ant hill with ants; intensively cultivated, some
of the crops like the dhourra or millet, the principal food of the poor,
returning to the sower two hundred and fifty times its seed; shaded by
date palms which yield abundant and delicious fruit; a land with a
delightful climate seasonably watered, fertilized by yearly tides and
protected from invasion by wide deserts of soft sand; why should we not
have been a happy people?

Because no one is free. We are enslaved by caste, a most merciless
master, by the priesthood, by our king. We work continually, but for
others. Happy he, who when life is done, after contributing to the
priesthood and the king, after sacrificing to a hundred gods, leaves
sufficient estate to pay for the embalming of and a safe resting place
for his body.

This is the best of a short life, with the sad hope that after you have
been many times a lower form of life, you may return to your old body
if, perchance, it may be found. Far better off the unclean fish, which,
when the flood recedes, gasp themselves to death in shallow pools,
choked by the sand.

I rose from my couch and walked out where a better view might be had of
the river and the valley.

Near a small eminence more than sixty feet above the flood tide was a
great fleet of barges and rafts of logs, which had borne heavy blocks of
cut stone from far to the southward down on the tide to construct our
tombs and temples.

Upon the rafts and barges low caste humanity, driven by the lash to
tortured effort, swarmed and sweated and groaned that some high priest
or royal personage might in mummied grandeur await his soul's return to
its foul, flinty, wrinkled and desolate home. Near, floating northward
with the tide, was a great obelisk of granite weighing more than forty
tons, held upon the surface by parallel rafts of buoyant logs and
inflated skins.

I was head embalmer, one of the priesthood and, therefore, considered
one of the fortunate ones.

The city of Meidoom was called the City of the Dead, because at that
time, 3750 B. C., it was the place of burial of the royalty and
priesthood of Men-nefu, which name means secure and bea