tizens, although in Thebes itself people
always avoided them with a certain horror; only the paraschites, whose
duty it was to open the body, bore the whole curse of uncleanness.
Certainly the place where these people fulfilled their office was dismal
enough.

The stone chamber in which the bodies were opened, and the halls in
which they were prepared with salt, had adjoining them a variety of
laboratories and depositaries for drugs and preparations of every
description.

In a court-yard, protected from the rays of the sun only by an awning,
was a large walled bason, containing a solution of natron, in which
the bodies were salted, and they were then dried in a stone vault,
artificially supplied with hot air.

The little wooden houses of the weavers, as well as the work-shops
of the case-joiners and decorators, stood in numbers round the
pattern-room; but the farthest off, and much the largest of the
buildings of the establishment, was a very long low structure, solidly
built of stone and well roofed in, where the prepared bodies were
enveloped in their cerements, tricked out in amulets, and made ready for
their journey to the next world. What took place in this building--into
which the laity were admitted, but never for more than a few
minutes--was to the last degree mysterious, for here the gods themselves
appeared to be engaged with the mortal bodies.

Out of the windows which opened on the street, recitations, hymns, and
lamentations sounded night and day. The priests who fulfilled their
office here wore masks like the divinities of the under-world. Many were
the representatives of Anubis, with the jackal-head, assisted by boys
with masks of the so-called child-Horus. At the head of each mummy stood
or squatted a wailing-woman with the emblems of Nephthys, and one at its
feet with those of Isis.

Every separate limb of the deceased was dedicated to a particular
divinity by the aid of holy oils, charms, and sentences; a specially
prepared cloth was wrapped round each muscle, every drug and every
bandage owed its origin to some divinity, and the confusion of sounds,
of disguised figures, and of various perfumes, had a stupefying effect
on those who visited this chamber. It need not be said that the whole
embalming establishment and its neighborhood was enveloped in a cloud
of powerful resinous fumes, of sweet attar, of lasting musk, and pungent
spices.

When the wind blew from the west it was wafted across the