We Are Now Completely
Sheltered From The Bitter Wind Which Blows Across The Desert, And From
The Dark Doorway That Opens Before Us Comes A Breath Of Air As From An
Oven.
It is always dry and hot in the underground funeral places of
Egypt, which make indeed admirable stoves for mummies.
The threshold
once crossed we are plunged first of all in darkness and, preceded by
a lantern, make our way, by devious turnings, over large flagstones,
passing obelisks, fallen blocks of stone and other gigantic debris, in
a heat that continually increases.
At last the principal artery of the hypogeum appears, a thoroughfare
more than five hundred yards long, cut in the rock, where the Bedouins
have prepared for us the customary feeble light.
It is a place of fearful aspect. As soon as one enters one is seized
by the sense of a mournfulness beyond words, by an oppression as of
something too heavy, too crushing, almost superhuman. The impotent
little flames of the candles, placed in a row, in groups of fifty, on
tripods of wood from one end of the route to the other, show on the
right and left of the immense avenue rectangular sepulchral caverns,
containing each a black coffin, but a coffin as if for a mastodon. And
all these coffins, so sombre and so alike, are square shaped too,
severely simple like so many boxes; but made out of a single block of
rare granite that gleams like marble. They are entirely without
ornament.
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