own the slope. Two
other boulders of less size went the same way, one after another, and
then it was plain that the belief of the Greek was justified. The
entrance to a tomb, which had evidently escaped the investigations of
the treasure-seekers, appeared in all its integrity.

It was a sort of portico squarely cut in the living rock. On the two
side-walls a couple of pairs of pillars exhibited capitals formed of
bulls' heads, the horns of which were twisted like the crescent of Isis.
Below the low door, with its jambs flanked by long panels covered with
hieroglyphs, there was a broad, emblematic square. In the centre of a
yellow disc showed by the side of the scarabaeus, symbol of successive
new births, the ram-headed god, the symbol of the setting sun. Outside
the disc, Isis and Nephthys, incarnations of the Beginning and the End,
were kneeling, one leg bent under the thigh, the other raised to the
height of the elbow, in the Egyptian attitude, the arms stretched
forward with an air of mysterious amazement, and the body clothed in a
close fitting gown girdled by a belt with falling ends. Behind a wall of
stone and unbaked brick, that readily yielded to the pickaxes of the
workmen, was discovered the stone slab which formed the doorway of the
subterranean monument. On the clay seal which closed it, the German
doctor, thoroughly familiar with hieroglyphs, had no difficulty in
reading the motto of the guardian of the funeral dwellings, who had
closed forever this tomb, the situation of which he alone could have
found upon the map of burial-places preserved in the priests' college.

"I begin to believe," said the delighted scholar to the young nobleman,
"that we have actually found a prize, and I withdraw the unfavourable
opinion which I expressed about this worthy Greek."

"Perhaps we are rejoicing too soon," answered Lord Evandale, "and we may
experience the same disappointment as Belzoni, when he believed himself
to be the first to enter the tomb of Menephtha Seti, and found, after he
had traversed a labyrinth of passages, walls, and chambers, an empty
sarcophagus with a broken cover; for the treasure-seekers had reached
the royal tomb through one of their soundings driven in at another point
in the mountain."

"Oh, no," answered the doctor; "the range is too broad here and the
hypogeum too distant from the others for these wretched people to have
carried their mines as far as this, even if they scraped away the roc