They Are The Temples And Statues For The Manes Of Numberless Kings And Queens, Who During Three Or Four Thousand Years Had Their Mummies Buried Hard By In The Heart Of The Mountains, In The Deepest Of The Walled And Secret Galleries.

And now the cornfields have ceased; there is no longer any herbage - nothing.

We have crossed the desolate threshold, we are in the desert, and tread suddenly upon a disquieting funereal soil, half sand, half ashes, that is pitted on all sides with gaping holes. It looks like some region that had long been undermined by burrowing beasts. But it is men who, for more than fifty centuries, have vexed this ground, first to hide the mummies in it, and afterwards, and until our day, to exhume them. Each of these holes has enclosed its corpse, and if you peer within you may see yellow-coloured rags still trailing there; and bandages, or legs and vertebrae of thousands of years ago. Some lean Bedouins, who exercise the office of excavators, and sleep hard by in holes like jackals, advance to sell us scarabaei, blue-glass trinkets that are half fossilised, and feet or hands of the dead.

And now farewell to the fresh morning. Every minute the heat becomes more oppressive. The pathway that is marked only by a row of stones turns at last and leads into the depths of the mountain by a tragical passage. We enter now into that "Valley of the Kings" which was the place of the last rendezvous of the most august mummies.

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