n tomb where the untouched dead lie with
their jewels upon them. Four miles away are the wide-winged, rampant
hotels. Here is nothing whatever but the rubbish of death that died
thousands of years ago, on whose grave no green thing has ever grown.
Villages, expert in two hundred generations of grave-robbing, cower
among the mounds of wastage, and whoop at the daily tourist. Paths made
by bare feet run from one half-tomb, half-mud-heap to the next, not much
more distinct than snail smears, but they have been used since....

Time is a dangerous thing to play with. That morning the concierge had
toiled for us among steamer-sailings to see if we could save three days.
That evening we sat with folk for whom Time had stood still since the
Ptolemies. I wondered, at first, how it concerned them or any man if
such and such a Pharaoh had used to his own glory the plinths and
columns of such another Pharaoh before or after Melchizedek. Their
whole background was too inconceivably remote for the mind to work on.
But the next morning we were taken to the painted tomb of a noble--a
Minister of Agriculture--who died four or five thousand years ago. He
said to me, in so many words: 'Observe I was very like your friend, the
late Mr. Samuel Pepys, of your Admiralty. I took an enormous interest in
life, which I most thoroughly enjoyed, on its human and on its spiritual
side. I do not think you will find many departments of State better
managed than mine, or a better-kept house, or a nicer set of young
people ... My daughters! The eldest, as you can see, takes after her
mother. The youngest, my favourite, is supposed to favour me. Now I will
show you all the things that I did, and delighted in, till it was time
for me to present my accounts elsewhere.' And he showed me, detail by
detail, in colour and in drawing, his cattle, his horses, his crops, his
tours in the district, his accountants presenting the revenue returns,
and he himself, busiest of the busy, in the good day.

But when we left that broad, gay ante-room and came to the narrower
passage where once his body had lain and where all his doom was
portrayed, I could not follow him so well. I did not see how he, so
experienced in life, could be cowed by friezes of brute-headed
apparitions or satisfied by files of repeated figures. He explained,
something to this effect:

'We live on the River--a line without breadth or thickness. Behind us
is the Desert, which nothing can affect; w