ple are but enlarged picture-writing made into tableaus.
Through such tableaus Ani moves. The Ani manuscript has so fascinated
some of the Egyptologists that it is copied in figures fifteen feet high
on the walls of two of the rooms of the British Museum. And you can read
the story eloquently told in Maspero.

Ani knocks at many doors in the underworld. Monstrous gatekeepers are
squatting on their haunches with huge knives to slice him if he cannot
remember their names or give the right password, or by spells the priests
have taught him, convince the sentinels that he is Osiris himself. To
further the illusion the name of Osiris is inscribed on his breast. While
he is passing these perils his little wife is looking on by a sort of
clairvoyant sympathy, though she is still alive. She is depicted mourning
him and embracing his mummy on earth at the same time she accompanies him
through the shadows.

Ani ploughs and sows and reaps in the fields of the underworld. He is
carried past a dreadful place on the back of the cow Hathor. After as
many adventures as Browning's Childe Roland he steps into the
judgment-hall of the gods. They sit in majestic rows. He makes the proper
sacrifices, and advances to the scales of justice. There he sees his own
heart weighed against the ostrich-feather of Truth, by the jackal-god
Anubis, who has already presided at his embalming. His own soul, in the
form of a human-headed hawk, watches the ceremony. His ghost, which is
another entity, looks through the door with his little wife. Both of them
watch with tense anxiety. The fate of every phase of his personality
depends upon the purity of his heart.

Lying in wait behind Anubis is a monster, part crocodile, part lion, part
hippopotamus. This terror will eat the heart of Ani if it is found
corrupt. At last he is declared justified. Thoth, the ibis-headed God of
Writing, records the verdict on his tablet. The justified Ani moves on
past the baffled devourer, with the mystic presence of his little wife
rejoicing at his side. They go to the awful court of Osiris. She makes
sacrifice with him there. The God of the Dead is indeed a strange deity,
a seated semi-animated mummy, with all the appurtenances of royalty, and
with the four sons of Horus on a lotus before him, and his two wives,
Isis and Nephthys, standing behind his throne with their hands on his
shoulders.

The justified soul now boards the boat in which the sun rides as it
journeys th