Here, As At Thebes And Memphis, The Tombs Of The Egyptians Are Met
With Only Amongst The Sands And The Parched Rocks.
The great ancestral
people, who would have shuddered at our black trees, and the
corruption of the damp graves, liked to place its embalmed dead in the
midst of this luminous, changeless splendour of death, which men call
the desert.
*****
And what is this now that is happening in the holy neighbourhood of
unhappy Osiris? A troupe of donkeys, belaboured by Bedouin drivers, is
being driven in the direction of the adjacent temple, dedicated to the
god by Seti! The luncheon no doubt is over and the band about to
depart, sharp to the appointed hour of the programme. Let us watch
them from a prudent distance.
To be brief, they all mount into their saddles, these Cooks and
Cookesses, and opening, not without a conscious air of majesty, their
white cotton parasols, take themselves off in the direction of the
Nile. They disappear and the place belongs to us.
When we venture at last to return to the first sanctuary, where they
had lunched their fill in the shade, the guardians are busy clearing
away the leavings and the dirty paper. And they pack the dubious
crockery, which will be required for to-morrow's luncheon, into large
chests on which may be read in large letters of glory the names of the
veritable sovereigns of modern Egypt: "Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt
Ltd.)."
All this happily ends with the first hypostyle.
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