granite sanctuary of Karnak, the granite quarries of Assouan are said to be musical also; and the "music-stones" of the Orinoco are well known. The extensive broken and sloping surface of the Colossus, wet with the dews of early morning-the tears of Eos over her child, according to the Greek myth-becomes suddenly warm at sunrise, and “the current of air produced by this rapid change of temperature passing over its rough and pebbly surface" produces the mystic sound. The "eminent physicists" who offer us this explanation of the song of the Northern Colossus have omitted, it will be seen, to explain the silence of its colleague; but this by the way. Enough that science satisfies herself in the matter, and that as the chant of the Memnon was holy to the mytho-poet and fraudulent to the ancient geographer, so it is simply a natural effect of heat and moisture to the modern sage. To our assembled party at the base of the statue it is the resonant clang of a small metallic gong or tambourine, stricken by an exceptionally tattered Arab who has with catlike agility swarmed up the twenty feet or so of pedestal and granite calf and clambered over the thigh of the Colossus into his monstrous lap, in the hollow of which both instrument and musician could easily lie concealed. It was typical of the history of human thought! First, the age of myth; secondly, the age of religious faith; thirdly, the age of philosophic doubt; and lastly, the age of blank and ribald materialism. At one end of the long chain of the centuries a hushed and awestricken throng of kneeling worshippers waiting for a sign; at the

other, a crowd of globe-trotters gazing upward from the backs of their donkeys, while a ragged Arab clambers on to the knees of the desecrated Memnon to bang a gong for a piastre.

What irony in the thought that these mighty stones around us were piled by groaning millions under the scourges of their square-browed tyrants to make a holiday sight for us! Shelley's well-known sonnet on the empty boast of "Osymandias, King of Kings," did that potentate injustice. Osymandias, it is agreed, was Rameses the Great, and certainly the mightiest monarchs "looking on his works" might well "despair." But though the Ramesseum and the Temple of Karnak have survived to render his name eternal, he, like every Pharaoh of them all, has missed the far more vital eternity that he sought.

With infinite care and pains did the great king labour to protect his mortal remains from displacement, so that after the lapse of long ages the soul might find them ready for reunion with it under the decree of the gods of the dead. It was for this purpose that the highest and costliest skill of the embalmer was secured for the preparation of the mummy; for this that the Royal Tombs of Der-el-Bahari were scooped deep in the living rock, and the ponderous sarcophagi disposed far down in its lowest and inmost recesses. Nay, it might almost have seemed as if Nature, co-operating with the designs of the Pharaohs, had assisted to secure the everlasting sanctity of these sepulchres by covering them for ages under the desert sands. But in vain.

Rameses the Great proposed (about 1300 B. c.) but in 1871 Abd-er-Rasûl Ahmed, native of the Arab village of Kurnah, virtually disposed. For in that year Abd-er-Rasûl," prospecting around" among these sand-strewn rocks, chanced upon a large buried tomb filled with coffins heaped one upon another. On the greater number of them the cartouche and other signs indicated that their tenants were Royal personages and that their lucky discoverer had made a "find" of the greatest value. There were the mummies of kings, queens, and princesses belonging to no fewer than five Egyptian dynasties, and among them was that of Rameses the Great.

But alas! for Abd-er-Rasûl! They were too heavy for one man to move, or even effectively to rifle. He had to let two of his brothers and one of his sons into the secret, and unable to dispose of the mummies en gros they determined to exploit them en détail. For some time the firm drove a prosperous trade on the Nile, selling these priceless treasures doubtless for, comparatively speaking, so many "songs," and replenishing their store, whenever it ran short, by gruesome descents, under cover of the night, to the bottom of these long hidden tombs, forty feet beneath the earth's surface, and approached by sculptured and pictured corridor of seventy yards in length. The game, however, was too good to last. Scarabs, papyri, jewels, of startling age and yet undoubted genuineness, began to find their way into the hands of experts, and Egyptologists began to smell a rat. M. Maspero, the

indefatigable Director of the Boulak Museum, was communicated with, and promptly betook himself to Thebes, armed with full powers of investigation. Abd-er-Rasûl was arrested by the police, examined-some say "put to the question" in the old grim sense of the phraseimprisoned, released, and finally frightened into turning "Khedive's evidence" and making a clean breast of it to the Mudir of Keneh. Then all the Royal mummies were exhumed, and as some of them were found to be decomposing M. Maspero decided to unroll the whole collection, and Rameses II. was the first of these mighty rulers and builders whose features were shown to the world once more after a lapse of 3,200 years. That exposure meant the final defeat of the crowning effort of his religious creed. Osiris and his forty-two colleagues may have long since pronounced favourable sentence on him in the judgment-hall of the underworld; and Thoth, the clerk of the gods, may have duly inscribed it on his papyrus roll. But the body of Osymandias, King of Kings, which was embalmed so carefully and hidden so sedulously within tons of granite sarcophagus, and under fathoms of limestone rock, to be in everlasting readiness for reanimation, lies black and mouldering in the Ghizeh Museum, as unfit for reunion with the soul as are the bones of his son Seti Meneptah, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, bleaching at the bottom of the Red Sea.

THE TOMBS OF BENI HASAN

GEORG EBERS

HE inscriptions in the tombs at Beni Hasan show

TH

that they were hewn in the rock or painted with stucco for the illustrious hereditary governors of the district of Mah, who were related to the royal family, and who governed under the Pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty, between 2354-2194 B. C. A long series of centuries separated them from the earliest Greek work in the style we term Doric; and yet who that has seen Paestum and other buildings of that class, can fail to be reminded of these when he sees the tombs of Beni Hasan ?

The tombs lie in two groups near each other. The northernmost includes the most interesting tombs, and of these two in particular are the most attractive. Even the ante-chamber, or approach to the tomb, which the hereditary prince-governor, Amenemha (also called Ameni), had made for his eternal rest, attracts our attention. Two beautiful polygonal pillars support the arched roof, hewn out of the living rock, while its inner side rests in the smooth and polished face of the cliff within which the tomb is excavated.

We enter this mortuary chapel through a door crowned with the hollowed-out Egyptian architrave, and here we