eir pose in the darkness for some three thousand years
before the commencement of the Christian era. . . . In order to show it
to us better the group is brought to the window, and the mournful light
which enters from across the infinite solitudes of the desert colours
them yellow and shows us in detail their little doll-like attitudes
and their comical and frightened appearance--frightened perhaps to find
themselves so old and issuing from so deep a night. They had not seen a
setting of the sun, such as they now regard with their queer eyes, too
long and too wide oepn, they had not seen such a thing for some five
thousand years. . . .

The habitation of the Apis, the lords of the necropolis, is little more
than two hundred yards away. We are told that the place is now lighted
up and that we may betake ourselves thither.

The descent is by a narrow, rapidly sloping passage, dug in the soil,
between banks of sand and broken stones. We are now completely sheltered
from the bitter wind which blows across the desert, and from the dark
doorway that opens before us comes a breath of air as from an oven. It
is always dry and hot in the underground funeral places of Egypt, which
make indeed admirable stoves for mummies. The threshold once crossed we
are plunged first of all in darkness and, preceded by a lantern, make
our way, by devious turnings, over large flagstones, passing obelisks,
fallen blocks of stone and other gigantic debris, in a heat that
continually increases.

At last the principal artery of the hypogeum appears, a thoroughfare
more than five hundred yards long, cut in the rock, where the Bedouins
have prepared for us the customary feeble light.

It is a place of fearful aspect. As soon as one enters one is seized
by the sense of a mournfulness beyond words, by an oppression as of
something too heavy, too crushing, almost superhuman. The impotent
little flames of the candles, placed in a row, in groups of fifty, on
tripods of wood from one end of the route to the other, show on the
right and left of the immense avenue rectangular sepulchral caverns,
containing each a black coffin, but a coffin as if for a mastodon.
And all these coffins, so sombre and so alike, are square shaped too,
severely simple like so many boxes; but made out of a single block
of rare granite that gleams like marble. They are entirely without
ornament. It is necessary to look closely to distinguish on the smooth
walls the hieroglyphic in