rough the night. He rises a glorious boatman in the morning,
working an oar to speed the craft through the high ocean of the noon sky.
Henceforth he makes the eternal round with the sun. Therefore in Ancient
Egypt the roll was called, not the Book of the Dead, but _The Chapters on
Coming Forth by Day_.

This book on motion pictures does not profess to be an expert treatise on
Egyptology as well. The learned folk are welcome to amend the modernisms
that have crept into it. But the fact remains that something like this
story in one form or another held Egypt spell-bound for many hundred
years. It was the force behind every mummification. It was the reason for
the whole Egyptian system of life, death, and entombment, for the man not
embalmed could not make the journey. So the explorer finds the Egyptian
with a roll of this papyrus as a guide-book on his mummy breast. The soul
needed to return for refreshment periodically to the stone chamber, and
the mummy mutilated or destroyed could not entertain the guest. Egypt
cried out through thousands of years for the ultimate resurrection of the
whole man, his _coming forth by day_.

We need not fear that a story that so dominated a race will be lost on
modern souls when vividly set forth. Is it too much to expect that some
American prophet-wizard of the future will give us this film in the
spirit of an Egyptian priest?

The Greeks, the wisest people in our limited system of classics, bowed
down before the Egyptian hierarchy. That cult must have had a fine
personal authority and glamour to master such men. The unseen mysteries
were always on the Egyptian heart as a burden and a consolation, and
though there may have been jugglers in the outer courts of these temples,
as there have been in the courts of all temples, no mere actor could make
an Egyptian priest of himself. Their very alphabet has a regal
enchantment in its lines, and the same aesthetic-mystical power remains in
their pylons and images under the blaze of the all-revealing noonday sun.

Here is a nation, America, going for dreams into caves as shadowy as the
tomb of Queen Thi. There they find too often, not that ancient priestess
and ruler, nor any of her kin, nor yet Ani the scribe, nor yet any of the
kings, but shabby rags of fancy, or circuses that were better in the
street.

Because ten million people daily enter into the cave, something akin to
Egyptian wizardry, certain national rituals, will be born. By stud