abians who
counterfeited mummies so accurately that it needed great skill to
distinguish the false from the true. Queasy stomachs would hardly fancy
the doubtful potion, wherein one might so easily swallow a cloud for his
Juno, and defraud the fowls of the air while in conceit enjoying the
conserves of Canopus....

For those dark caves and mummy repositories are Satan's abodes, wherein
he speculates and rejoices on human vainglory, and keeps those kings and
conquerors, whom alive he bewitched, whole for that great day when he
will claim his own, and marshal the kings of Nilus and Thebes in sad
procession unto the pit.

Death, that fatal necessity which so many would overlook or blinkingly
survey, the old Egyptians held continually before their eyes. Their
embalmed ancestors they carried about at their banquets, as holding them
still a part of their families, and not thrusting them from their places
at feasts. They wanted not likewise a sad preacher at their tables to
admonish them daily of death,--surely an unnecessary discourse while
they banqueted in sepulchres. Whether this were not making too much of
death, as tending to assuefaction, some reason there is to doubt; but
certain it is that such practices would hardly be embraced by our modern
gourmands, who like not to look on faces of _mortua_, or be elbowed
by mummies.

Yet in those huge structures and pyramidal immensities, of the builders
whereof so little is known, they seemed not so much to raise sepulchres
or temples to death as to contemn and disdain it, astonishing heaven
with their audacities, and looking forward with delight to their
interment in those eternal piles. Of their living habitations they made
little account, conceiving of them but as _hospitia_, or inns, while
they adorned the sepulchres of the dead, and, planting thereon lasting
bases, defied the crumbling touches of time and the misty vaporousness
of oblivion. Yet all were but Babel vanities. Time sadly overcometh all
things, and is now dominant, and sitteth upon a sphinx, and looketh
unto Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth
semisomnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of
Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh
beneath her cloud. The traveler, as he paceth amazedly through those
deserts, asketh of her, Who builded them? and she mumbleth something,
but what it is he heareth not.

Egypt itself is now become the land