because of my
mutilation--he who, from the day of my birth, set a whole nation to work
to hollow out a tomb so deep that he might preserve me intact until that
supreme last day, when souls must be weighed in the scales of Amenti!
Come with me to my father; he will be happy to receive you, for you have
given me back my foot."

I found this proposition quite natural. I decked myself out in a
dressing-gown of huge sprawling design, which gave me an extremely
Pharaohesque appearance; I hurriedly put on a pair of Turkish slippers,
and told the Princess Hermonthis that I was ready to follow her.

Before setting out, Hermonthis detached from her necklace the little
green paste image and placed it on the scattered papers which strewed
the table.

"It is no more than right," she said smilingly, "that I should replace
your paper weight."

She gave me her hand, which was soft and cool as the skin of a serpent,
and we departed.

For a time we sped with the rapidity of an arrow, through a misty
expanse of space, in which almost indistinguishable silhouettes flashed
by us, on the right and left.

For an instant we saw nothing but sea and sky.

A few minutes later, towering obelisks, pillars, the sloping outlines of
the sphinx, were designed against the horizon.

We had arrived.

The princess conducted me to the side of a mountain of red granite in
which there was an aperture so low and narrow that, had it not been
marked by two monoliths covered with bizarre carvings, it would have
been difficult to distinguish from the fissures in the rock.

Hermonthis lighted a torch and led the way.

The corridors were hewn through the living rock. The walls, with panels
covered with hieroglyphics, and representations of allegorical
processions, must have been the work of thousands of hands for thousands
of years; the corridors, of an interminable length, ended in square
rooms, in the middle of which pits had been constructed, to which we
descended by means of _crampons_ or spiral staircases. These pits led us
into other rooms, from which opened out other corridors embellished in
the same bizarre manner with sparrow-hawks, serpents coiled in circles,
the symbolic tau, pedum, and baris, prodigious works which no living eye
should ever see, interminable legends in granite which only the dead
throughout eternity have time to read.

At last we reached a hall so vast, so boundless, so immeasurable, that
its limits could not be discerne