ft through the mountain."

"Those confounded Egyptians were clever indeed at concealing the
entrances to their tombs,--always trying to find out some way of putting
poor people off the track. One would think that they laughed in
anticipation at the disappointment of searchers," grumbled Argyropoulos.
Drawing to the edge of the well, the Greek cast a glance, as piercing as
that of a night-bird, upon the wall of the little chamber which formed
the upper portion of the well. He saw nothing but the ordinary
characters of psychostasia,--Osiris the judge seated on his throne in
the regulation attitude, holding the crook in the one hand, the whip in
the other, and the goddesses of Justice and Truth leading the spirit of
the dead to the tribunal of Amenti. Suddenly he seemed to be struck with
a new idea, and turned sharply around. His long experience as an
excavator recalled to him a somewhat analogous case. In addition, the
desire of earning the thousand guineas of his lordship spurred up his
faculties. He took a pick-axe from the hands of a fellah, and began,
walking backward, to strike sharply right and left on the surface of the
rock, often at the risk of damaging some of the hieroglyphs or of
breaking the beak or the wing-sheath of the sacred hawk or the
scarabaeus.

The wall, thus questioned, at last answered the hammer and sounded
hollow. An exclamation of triumph broke from the Greek and his eyes
flashed; the doctor and the nobleman clapped their hands.

"Dig here," said Argyropoulos, who had recovered his coolness, to his
men.

An opening large enough to allow a man to pass through was made. A
gallery running within the mountain around the obstacle which the well
offered to the profane, led to a square hall, the blue vault of which
rested upon four massive pillars ornamented by the red-skinned,
white-garmented figures which so often show, in Egyptian frescoes, the
full bust and the head in profile. This hall opened into another, the
vault of which was somewhat higher and supported by two pillars only.
Various scenes--the mystic bark, the bull Apis bearing the mummy towards
the regions of the West, the judgment of the soul and the weighing of
the deeds of the dead in the supreme scales, the offerings to the
funeral divinities--adorned the pillars and the hall. They were carved
in flat, low relief with sharp outline, but the painter's brush had not
completed the work of the chisel. By the care and delicacy of the wor