What A Prodigious Labour Must Have Been
Entailed By This Perforation Of The Living Rock!
And this hypogeum is
not unique.
All along the "Valley of the Kings" little insignificant
doors - which to the initiated reveal the "Sign of the Shadow,"
inscribed on their lintels - lead to other subterranean places, just as
sumptuous and perfidiously profound, with their snares, their hidden
wells, their oubliettes and the bewildering multiplicity of their
mural figures. And all these tombs this morning were full of people,
and, if we had not had the good fortune to arrive after the usual
hour, we should have met here, even in this dwelling of Amenophis, a
battalion equipped by Messrs. Cook.
In this hall, with its blue ceiling, the frescoes multiply their
riddles: scenes from the book of Hades, all the funeral ritual
translated into pictures. On the pillars and walls crowd the different
demons that an Egyptian soul was likely to meet in its passage through
the country of shadows, and underneath the passwords which were to be
given to each of them are recapitulated so as not to be forgotten.
For the soul used to depart simultaneously under the two forms of a
flame[*] and a falcon[+] respectively. And this country of shadows,
called also the west, to which it had to render itself, was that where
the moon sinks and where each evening the sun goes down; a country to
which the living were never able to attain, because it fled before
them, however fast they might travel across the sands or over the
waters. On its arrival there, the scared soul had to parley
successively with the fearsome demons who lay in wait for it along its
route. If at last it was judged worthy to approach Osiris, the great
Dead Sun, it was subsumed in him and reappeared, shining over the
world the next morning and on all succeeding mornings until the
consummation of time - a vague survival in the solar splendour, a
continuation without personality, of which one is scarcely able to say
whether or not it was more desirable than eternal non-existence.
[*] The Khou, which never returned to our world.
[+] The Bai, which might, at its will, revisit the tomb.
And, moreover, it was necessary to preserve the body at whatever cost,
for a certain /double/ of the dead man continued to dwell in the dry
flesh, and retained a kind of half life, barely conscious. Lying at
the bottom of the sarcophagus it was able to see, by virtue of those
two eyes, which were painted on the lid, always in the same axis as
the empty eyes of the mummy. Sometimes, too, this /double/, escaping
from the mummy and its box, used to wander like a phantom about the
hypogeum. And, in order that at such times it might be able to obtain
nourishment, a mass of mummified viands wrapped in bandages were
amongst the thousand and one things buried at its side. Even natron
and oils were left, so that it might re-embalm itself, if the worms
came to life in its members.
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