k."

While this conversation was going on, the workmen, urged by
Argyropoulos, proceeded to lift the great stone slab which filled up the
orifice of the passage. As they cleared away the slab in order to pass
their crow-bars under it, for Lord Evandale had ordered that nothing
should be broken, they turned up in the sand innumerable small
statuettes a few inches in height, of blue and green enamelled ware, of
admirable workmanship,--tiny funeral statuettes deposited there as
offerings by parents and friends, just as we place flowers on the
thresholds of our funeral chapels; only, our flowers wither, while after
more than three thousand years these witnesses of long bygone griefs are
found intact, for Egypt worked for eternity only.

When the door was lifted away, giving for the first time in thirty-five
centuries entrance to the light of day, a puff of hot air escaped from
the sombre opening as from the mouth of a furnace. The light, striking
the entrance of the funeral passage, brought out brilliantly the
colouring of the hieroglyphs engraved upon the walls in perpendicular
lines upon a blue plinth. A reddish figure with a hawk's-head crowned
with the _pschent_, the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, bore a
disc containing a winged globe, and seemed to watch on the threshold of
the tomb. Some fellahs lighted torches and preceded the two travellers,
who were accompanied by Argyropoulos. The resinous flame burned with
difficulty in the dense, stifling air which had been concentrated for so
many thousands of years under the heated limestone of the mountain, in
the labyrinths, passages, and blind ways of the hypogeum. Rumphius
breathed hard and perspired in streams; the impassible Evandale turned
hot and felt a moisture on his temples. As for the Greek, the fiery wind
of the desert had long since dried him up, and he perspired no more than
would a mummy.

The passage led directly to the centre of the chain, following a vein of
limestone of remarkable fineness and purity. At the end of the
passageway a stone door, sealed as the other had been with a clay seal
and surmounted by a winged globe, proved that the tomb had not been
violated and pointed to the existence of another passageway sunk deeper
still into the mountain.

The heat was now so intense that the young nobleman threw off his white
coat, and the doctor his black one. These were soon followed by their
vests and shirts. Argyropoulos, seeing that they were b