n a light that is almost brutal,
upon these august dead, who fondly thought that they had hidden
themselves for ever.

But at night! . . . Ah! at night when all the doors are closed, it
is the palace of nightmare and of fear. At night, so say the Arab
guardians, who would not enter it at the price of gold--no, not even
after offering up a prayer--at night, horrible "forms" escape, not only
from the embalmed bodies that sleep in the glass cases above, but also
from the great statues, from the papyri, and the thousand and one things
that, at the bottom of the tombs, have long been impregnated with human
essence. And these "forms" are like unto dead bodies, and sometimes to
strange beasts, even to beasts that crawl. And, after having wandered
about the halls, they end by assembling for their nocturnal conferences
on the roofs.

We next ascend a staircase of monumental proportions, empty in the whole
extent, where we are delivered for a little while from the obsession of
those rigid figures, from the stares and smiles of the good people in
white stone and black granite who throng the galleries and vestibules on
the ground floor. None of them, to be sure, will follow us; but all the
same they guard in force and perplex with their shadows the only way by
which we can retreat, if the formidable hosts above have in store for us
too sinister a welcome.

He to whose courtesy I owe the relaxation of the orders of the night is
the illustrious savant to whose care has been entrusted the direction
of the excavations in Egyptian soil; he is also the comptroller of this
vast museum, and it is he himself who has kindly consented to act as my
guide to-night through its mazy labyrinth.

Across the silent halls above we now proceed straight towards those of
whom I have demanded this nocturnal audience.

To-night the succession of these rooms, filled with glass cases, which
cover more than four hundred yards along the four sides of the building,
seems to be without end. After passing, in turn, the papyri, the
enamels, the vases that contain human entrails, we reach the mummies
of the sacred beasts: cats, ibises, dogs, hawks, all with their mummy
cloths and sarcophagi; and monkeys, too, that remain grotesque even
in death. Then commence the human masks, and, upright in glass-fronted
cupboards, the mummy cases in which the body, swathed in its mummy
cloths, was moulded, and which reproduced, more or less enlarged, the
figure of the dece