th long
yellow palm-leaves. On the walls the symbolical globe spread its mighty
wings and the royal cartouches showed around. Farther on, Isis and
Nephthys waved their arms furnished with feathers like wings; the uraeus
swelled its blue throat, the scarabaeus unfolded its wings, the
animal-headed gods pricked up their jackal ears, sharpened their
hawk's-beaks, wrinkled their baboon faces, and drew into their shoulders
their vulture or serpent necks as if they were endowed with life.
Mystical consecrated boats (baris) passed by on their sledges drawn by
figures in attitudes of sadness, with angular gestures, or propelled by
half-naked oarsmen, they floated upon symbolical undulating waves.
Mourners kneeling, their hand placed on their blue hair in token of
grief, turned towards the catafalques, while shaven priests,
leopard-skin on shoulder, burned perfumes in a spatula terminating in a
hand bearing a cup under the nose of the godlike dead. Other personages
offered to the funeral genii lotus in bloom or in bud, bulbous plants,
birds, pieces of antelope, and vases of liquors. Acephalous figures of
Justice brought souls before Osiris, whose arms were set in inflexible
contour, and who was assisted by the forty-two judges of Amenti, seated
in two rows and bearing an ostrich-plume on their heads, the forms of
which were borrowed from every realm of zoology.

All these figures, drawn in hollowed lines in the limestone and painted
in the brightest colours, were endowed with that motionless life, that
frozen motion, that mysterious intensity of Egyptian art, which was
hemmed in by the priestly rule, and which resembles a gagged man trying
to utter his secret.

In the centre of the hall rose, massive and splendid, the sarcophagus,
cut out of a solid block of black basalt and closed by a cover of the
same material, carved in the shape of an arch. The four sides of the
funeral monolith were covered with figures and hieroglyphs as carefully
engraved as the intaglio of a gem, although the Egyptians did not know
the use of iron, and the grain of basalt is hard enough to blunt the
best-tempered steel. Imagination loses itself when it tries to discover
the process by which that marvellous people wrought on porphyry and
granite as with a style on wax tablets.

At the angles of the sarcophagus were set four vases of oriental
alabaster, of most elegant and perfect outline, the carved covers of
which represented the man's head of Amset,