ges,
keeping watch and ward over the empty tombs where the Pharaohs of Egypt
once slept, its head towering seventy feet into the air, its vast limbs
and body stretching for two hundred feet along the sand, the strangest
and most wonderful monument ever hewn by the hands of man (Plate 11).

Later on in Egyptian history the Kings and great folk grew tired of
building pyramids, and the fashion changed. Instead of raising huge
structures above ground, they began to hew out caverns in the rocks in
which to lay their dead. Round about Thebes, the rocks on the western
side of the Nile are honeycombed with these strange houses of the
departed. Their walls, in many cases, are decorated with bright and
cheerful pictures, showing scenes of the life which the dead man lived
on earth. There he stands, or sits, placid and happy, with his wife
beside him, while all around him his servants go about their usual work.
They plough and hoe, sow and reap; they gather the grapes from the vines
and put them into the winepress; or they bring the first-fruits of the
earth to present them before their master (Plate 15). In other pictures
you see the great man going out to his amusements, fishing, hunting, or
fowling; or you are taken into the town, and see the tradesmen working,
and the merchants, and townsfolk buying and selling in the bazaars. In
fact, the whole of life in Ancient Egypt passes before your eyes as you
go from chamber to chamber, and it is from these old tomb-pictures that
we have learned the most of what we know of how people lived and worked
in those long-past days.

In one wild rocky glen, called the "Valley of the Kings," nearly all the
later Pharaohs were buried, and to-day their tombs are one of the sights
of Thebes. Let us look at the finest of them--the tomb of Sety I., the
father of that Ramses II. of whom we have heard so much. Entering the
dark doorway in the cliff, you descend through passage after passage and
hall after hall, until at last you reach the fourteenth chamber, "the
gold house of Osiris," 470 feet from the entrance, where the great King
was laid in his magnificent alabaster coffin. The walls and pillars of
each chamber are wonderfully carved and painted. The pillars show
pictures of the King making offerings to the gods, or being welcomed by
them, but the pictures on the walls are very strange and weird. They
represent the voyage of the sun through the realms of the
under-world, and all the dangers and