stone with sharp edges may very well end in a booby-trap set for robbers by the builders of the tomb-a well several feet wide and anything up to a hundred feet deep. In the prepared tombs the shoots are covered with wooden staircases and the wells are bridged. As you proceed, you pass through chamber after chamber, with their lofty ceilings painted to represent the night sky glowing with stars and sometimes crowded with ghostly figures. All these chambers have their ceremonial uses. To detail them would weary rather than inform the reader. The chief interest to the sight-seer in almost every tomb lies at the end where once the Pharaoh, exquisitely embalmed, gloriously jewelled, wrapped in fine linen, cased in cedar and gold, and enclosed and guarded in a mighty sarcophagus of limestone or granite, began the serious business of his existence, the life beyond the grave.

In all the forty tombs of the Pharaohs of three dynasties which honeycomb the cliffs of the Valley of the Kings, there is only one royal mummy in the place where it was originally laid; only one sarcophagus in all its pristine beauty and perfection. More than one of the sarcophagi is preserved in the world's collections, the finest, that of King Seti I., in a museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The bodies of many of the Pharaohs, among them the very greatest, Thothmes III., Seti I., Rameses II., and Rameses III. are preserved in public museums; and the world is familiar with the lineaments of the faces of the men who carried the marvellous civilisation and art of ancient Egypt to its zenith. There is nothing of the ancient world that we know so well as Egypt: the desert embalmed her art and her monuments as surely as the expert with spices and bitumen embalmed the bodies of her kings. And the superstition of the ancient Egyptian, that no one without a name could enter into life after the grave, made him attach a definition in his longundeciphered hieroglyphics to each person and object on the pictured walls of his tombs. Therefore we have countless illustrated encyclopædias of the life and religion and history and art of the dwellers in the Nile Valley for fifty centuries

and more, and nowhere have we these encyclopædias so numerous, or on so stupendous a scale as in the Tombs of the Kings of Thebes.

In spite of the high temperature which, even in winter, was often over 80° Fahrenheit, I went many times into the Tombs of the Kings, always with a feeling of exultation as well as wonder. I loved to think that the pictures and sculptures upon which I was looking were there in the youth of the world, as long before the dawn of our era as we are after it. I loved to study the beautiful face of King Seti, the Lorenzo de Medici of Egyptian art. I loved the long vistas of walls glowing with processions and progresses. The whole atmo

sphere was superhuman.

And this feeling reached its zenith in the sepulchral chamber of Amen-hetep II. and Mer-en-Ptah II. Amenhetep II., whose mummy is the only one suffered to rest where its owner willed it, was another of the mightiest Pharaohs. He was the Amenophis who carried his successful arms twenty miles beyond Shendi, almost to the gates of Khartûm. The story of the discovery of his sarcophagus is most interestingly told by Mr. John Ward in his " Pyramids and Progress." He was riding through the valley when he noticed a little knot of men, who proved to be Government officials specially sent for the purpose from Cairo, and saw them open the tomb of Amen-hetep II.

"The coffin was unopened, and was covered with wreaths of olives, and flowers strewn on the floor and on the coffin were still perfect. The jewels and wrappings of the King's mummy were as when buried with him. When this unique 'find' is shown it will be interesting indeed. On the floor of the tomb a strange spectacle presented itself-three naked corpses, their throats cut and their breasts gashed, lay across the entrance. They had not been mummified, but the dry air of the vault had perfectly preserved them. It was conjectured that these had not been killed on the spot, but were possibly the corpses of malefactors thus mutilated and placed there to terrify any violators of the tomb; and this gruesome 1 Page 160.

group at the very door may really have saved the burialplace from the desecration which befell the other kings' tombs, every one of which has been robbed in ancient times."

Special pains were taken by the builders to mislead robbers, for the entrance and the first hall were left unfinished. Eight or nine other royal mummies were put here for safety, and discovered when the tomb was opened.

It is difficult to imagine anything more impressive than this mummy of a Pharaoh who lived more than 1500 years B.C., lying in its sarcophagus of rose-coloured stone in an attitude of perfect dignity and repose. You stand above it, and have the electric light turned on the dead face of him, who was the greatest man in the world while he was alive, from any side you please, by an Arab ghafir, who by his face and robes would do for an attendant of the Pharaoh.

The face, with its high, imperious nose, looks as if it had been cast in bronze.

The Government of Egypt have confered an enormous benefit on the scientist and the traveller by lighting these tombs with electricity. The engine is hidden in an inferior tomb, so it does not intrude; and the modern visitor sees the interiors as their architects never saw them.

Interesting and impressive as is the mummy of King Amen-hetep II., it yields in impressiveness to the monument of Mer-en-ptah II. Mer-en-ptah was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, the chief figure in one of the most famous episodes in the Bible; and there is not a more perfect monument in any cathedral in Europe, though it is older by two or three thousand years than any of them; it is of the highest beauty, and is in the highest state of preservation. The figure is one of exquisite dignity and repose, and the material is the matchless white limestone of Egypt, as beautiful in its grain as marble. Here, too, the electric light can be turned on from any side to make the white figure stand out in relief against the darkness of the sepulchral chamber. It is difficult to imagine anything more lovely and peaceful than the tomb of the Pharaoh of the Exodus, as he lies in his glory where

they laid him in the days of Moses. It is like an Etruscan tomb, columned and vaulted. The vast outer sarcophagus of granite which protected this masterpiece through thirty centuries lies in dishonoured neglect in one of the earlier chambers.

Hardly a year passes without the discovery of another royal tomb in this valley. I saw one which had just been opened; I had to be let down into it like the workmen. But it was not of high interest, though they were rescuing some wonderful jewels from the caked earth of the floor by the light of an electric lamp attached to a cord, like one uses for the writing table at one's club. But I went into the dismantled tomb, from which a year or two before one of the most extraordinary treasures of the ancient world ever discovered was taken the funerary furniture of the father-in-law and motherin-law of Amen-hetep III. This treasure included a splendid gold-plated chariot, gilded chairs, enormous gold-plated coffins, the beds with gold-plated heads, on which they had lain in life, and numerous smaller objects upon which a profusion of gold had been used, with the two most perfect mummies in the Cairo Museum. These mummies were the father and mother of the great Queen Thiy, whose son was the heretic Pharaoh, Akhnaton. Hard by is the tomb in which the sarcophagi of Thiy and Akhnaton were subsequently

discovered.

But the marvels of the Tombs of the Kings are endless. Besides this valley, in which the chief tombs are crowded, there is another and wilder gorge called the Western Valley, where even the surefooted ass can hardly pick his way among the boulders which have fallen from the heights, and where the movements of the adventurous visitor are guarded by a ghafir with a gun. Here there are large tombs of rather an interesting order; but they are difficult to explore, because they have not been fitted up with stairs and bridges and handrails, and have no electric light.

The scenery is, if anything, finer here than in the main gorge; still there is not a blade of vegetation; still the flamecoloured rocks, which counterfeit the most stupendous build

ings of man, are burning with sun-heat; still you see no life but serpents and insects and birds of prey.

A visit to the Tombs of the Kings is not complete unless you ride over the last spur of the Sahara to Der-el-Bahari by a path which has been in use since the days of the Pharaohs. This path takes you along the edge of the precipices which hem in the end of the valley. The gorge scenery is even more stupendous from above than it is from below-it sinks down so sheer from the Sahara plateau. And when you reach the highest point you have a view not easily to be matched anywhere, for Memnon and his brother Colossus, and the temples of Thebes lie at your feet; the Nile runs past you north and south as far as you can see; and on its farther bank are Luxor's temple, the most Greek in its outline of all the great temples of Egypt, and many-pyloned Karnak towering above its league-long groves of palms.