lowed to be seen the clean, firm contour of two virgin breasts like
two golden cups.

The sacred ram-headed bird, bearing between its green horns the red disc
of the setting sun and supported by two serpents wearing the pschent and
swelling out their hoods, showed on the bosom of the figure its
monstrous form full of symbolic meaning. Lower down, in the spaces left
free by the crossed zones, and rayed with brilliant colours representing
bandages, the vulture of Phra, crowned with a globe, with outspread
wings, the body covered with symmetrically arranged feathers, and the
tail spread out fanwise, held in its talons the huge Tau, emblem of
immortality. The funeral gods, green-faced, with the mouths of monkeys
or jackals, held out with a gesture hieratic in its stiffness the whip,
the crook, and the sceptre. The eye of Osiris opened its red ball
outlined with antimony. Celestial snakes swelled their hoods around the
sacred discs; symbolical figures projected their feathered arms; and the
two goddesses of the Beginning and the End, their hair powdered with
blue dust, bare down to below the breasts and the rest of the body
wrapped in a close-fitting skirt, knelt in Egyptian fashion on green and
red cushions adorned with heavy tufts.

A longitudinal band of hieroglyphs, springing from the belt and running
down to the feet, contained no doubt some formal funeral ritual, or
rather, the names and titles of the deceased, a problem which Dr.
Rumphius promised himself to solve later.

The character of the drawing, the boldness of the lines, the brilliancy
of the colours in all these paintings denoted in the plainest manner to
a practised eye that they belonged to the finest period of Egyptian art.
When the English nobleman and his companion had sufficiently studied
this outer case, they drew the cartonnage from the box and set it up
against the side of the cabin, where the funeral form, with its gilded
mask, presented a strange spectacle, standing upright like a
materialised spectre and with a seeming attitude of life, after having
preserved so long the horizontal attitude of death on a basalt bed in
the heart of the mountain, opened up by impious curiosity. The soul of
the deceased, which had reckoned on eternal rest and which had taken
such care to preserve its remains from violation, must have been moved,
beyond the worlds, in the circuit of its travels and transmigrations.

Dr. Rumphius, armed with a chisel and a hammer, to