e happy home in
dead Imperial Kor, where this winsome lady girt about with beauty had
lived and died, and dying taken her last-born with her to the tomb.
There they were before us, mother and babe, the white memories of a
forgotten human history speaking more eloquently to the heart than
could any written record of their lives. Reverently I replaced the
grave-cloths, and, with a sigh that flowers so fair should, in the
purpose of the Everlasting, have only bloomed to be gathered to the
grave, I turned to the body on the opposite shelf, and gently unveiled
it. It was that of a man in advanced life, with a long grizzled beard,
and also robed in white, probably the husband of the lady, who, after
surviving her many years, came at the last to sleep once more for good
and all beside her.

We left the place and entered others. It would be too long to describe
the many things I saw in them. Each one had its occupants, for the five
hundred and odd years that had elapsed between the completion of the
cave and the destruction of the race had evidently sufficed to fill
these catacombs, numberless as they were, and all appeared to have been
undisturbed since the day when they were placed there. I could fill a
book with the description of them, but to do so would only be to repeat
what I have said, with variations.

Nearly all the bodies, so masterfully was the art with which they had
been treated, were as perfect as on the day of death thousands of years
before. Nothing came to injure them in the deep silence of the living
rock: they were beyond the reach of heat and cold and damp, and the
aromatic drugs with which they had been saturated were evidently
practically everlasting in their effect. Here and there, however, we saw
an exception, and in these cases, although the flesh looked sound enough
externally, if one touched it it fell in, and revealed the fact that the
figure was but a pile of dust. This arose, Ayesha told me, from these
particular bodies having, either owing to haste in the burial or
other causes, been soaked in the preservative,[*] instead of its being
injected into the substance of the flesh.

[*] Ayesha afterwards showed me the tree from the leaves of
which this ancient preservative was manufactured. It is a
low bush-like tree, that to this day grows in wonderful
plenty upon the sides of the mountains, or rather upon the
slopes leading up to the rocky walls. The leaves are long