Oh! The Persistence Of This /Double/, Sealed There In The Tomb, A Prey
To Anxiety, Lest Corruption Should Take Hold
Of it; which had to serve
its long duration in suffocating darkness, in absolute silence,
without anything to mark the
Days and nights, or the seasons or the
centuries, or the tens of centuries without end! It was with such a
terrible conception of death as this that each one in those days was
absorbed in the preparation of his eternal chamber.
And for Amenophis II. this more or less is what happened to his
/double/. Unaccustomed to any kind of noise, after three or four
hundred years passed in the company of certain familiars, lulled in
the same heavy slumber as himself, he heard the sound of muffled blows
in the distance, by the side of the hidden well. The secret entrance
was discovered: men were breaking through its walls! Living beings
were about to appear, pillagers of tombs, no doubt, come to unswathe
them all! But no! Only some priests of Osiris, advancing with fear in
a funeral procession. They brought nine great coffins containing the
mummies of nine kings, his sons, grandsons and other unknown
successors, down to that King Setnakht, who governed Egypt two and a
half centuries after him. It was simply to hide them better that they
brought them hither, and placed them all together in a chamber that
was immediately walled up. Then they departed. The stones of the door
were sealed afresh, and everything fell again into the old mournful
and burning darkness.
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