xamine and clear out the interment. With
only the warning of the fall of a single pebble, or just a little
gutter of sand, a mass of perhaps two tons would suddenly drop with a
thud. On two occasions a man was caught by some part of the fall, and
once, just as the helpless man was being dug out, a clumsy helper
dislodged a few more hundredweight and buried him again. These are
anxious moments, for when this shifting ground has once begun to slip,
the whole side of a tomb may fall at once. Happily we had no serious
accident, though there were many narrow escapes. It is necessary in
such work to watch the men very carefully, and to insist on their
taking reasonable care, for they will, if left alone, burrow beneath
dangerously overhanging masses of soil rather than take the trouble of
removing them. The method in which the door of the burial-chamber was
closed was not at first clear; but four or five of the large jars (PL.
XIV) were so often found just inside the entrance that it seemed
probable they had been used as a building material, just as the
peasants near Keneh now use the spoilt water-jars from the potteries
there. Later on two of the doorways were found actually blocked up in
this way--three jars in the lower tier, two more above them, and the
interstices filled with mud. Probably, then, these large pots were the
common water-jars of the Middle Kingdom. Other tomb-doors were blocked
with bricks, very roughly laid. Coffins were very rare; there was one
of unbaked clay, long and narrow; and a trace of wood (No. 121) in
another grave may have been part of a coffin. But the soil of El Kab
is so damp and full of salt that unpainted wooden coffins may have
disappeared without leaving any trace. The same causes have doubtless
removed the clothes in which the dead were buried, for of these I
saw no trace. The most remarkable fact was the entire absence of
mummification, at least, of any effective kind. In the ground near the
good XVIIIth dynasty tombs, mummies were found, perhaps the servants
of the great men of the inscribed tombs. There seemed no great
difference in the conditions to which these mummies and the bodies
of the XIIth dynasty people had been exposed. Yet no trace of
mummy-cloth, dried skin, hair, or bitumen was ever met with in the
earlier cemetery. Nor in the early burials that I opened at Ballas
were any mummies found, and certainly most of the mummies known belong
to the XVIIIth dynasty or later. Is it