difficulties which the soul of the
dead man has to encounter as he accompanies the sun-bark on its journey.
Serpents, bats, and crocodiles, spitting fire, or armed with spears,
pursue the wicked. The unfortunates who fall into their power are
tortured in all kinds of horrible ways; their hearts are torn out; their
heads are cut off; they are boiled in caldrons, or hung head downwards
over lakes of fire. Gradually the soul passes through all these dangers
into the brighter scenes of the Fields of the Blessed, where the
justified sow and reap and are happy. Finally, the King arrives,
purified, at the end of his long journey, and is welcomed by the gods
into the Abode of the Blessed, where he, too, dwells as a god in
everlasting life.

[Illustration: Plate 15
WALL-PICTURES IN A THEBAN TOMB. _Pages_ 80, 81]

The beautiful alabaster coffin in which the mummy of King Sety was laid
is now in the Soane Museum, London. When it was discovered, nearly a
century ago, it was empty, and it was not till 1872 that some modern
tomb-robbers found the body of the King, along with other royal mummies,
hidden away in a deep pit among the cliffs. Now it lies in the museum at
Cairo, and you can see the face of this great King, its fine, proud
features not so very much changed, we can well believe, from what they
were when he reigned 3,200 years ago. In the same museum you can look
upon the faces of Tahutmes III., the greatest soldier of Egypt; of
Ramses II., the oppressor of the Israelites; and, perhaps most
interesting of all, of Merenptah, the Pharaoh who hardened his heart
when Moses pled with him to let the Hebrews go, and whose picked troops
were drowned in the Red Sea as they pursued their escaping slaves.

It is very strange to think that one can see the actual features and
forms on which the heroes of our Bible story looked in life. The reason
of such a thing is that the Egyptians believed that when a man died, his
soul, which passed to the life beyond, loved to return to its old home
on earth, and find again the body in which it once dwelt; and even,
perhaps, that the soul's existence in the other world depended in some
way on the preservation of the body. So they made the bodies of their
dead friends into what we call "mummies," steeping them for many days in
pitch and spices till they were embalmed, and then wrapping them round
in fold upon fold of fine linen. So they have endured all these hundreds
of years, to be stored at las