into it; and a fine entrance it
was! First, we had to go through an ante-room, which had both its doors
blocked up with stones; and then we had three granite portcullises to
pull up, one after another; and the moment we had got under them, Egypt
signed to somebody above; and down they came again behind us, with a
roar like thunder, only louder; then we got into a passage fit for
nobody but rats, and Egypt wouldn't go any further herself, but said we
might go on if we liked; and so we came to a hole in the pavement, and
then to a granite trap-door--and then we thought we had gone quite far
enough, and came back, and Egypt laughed at us.

EGYPT. You would not have had me take my crown off, and stoop all the
way down a passage fit only for rats?

L. It was not the crown, Egypt--you know that very well. It was the
flounces that would not let you go any farther. I suppose, however, you
wear them as typical of the inundation of the Nile, so it is all right.

ISABEL. Why didn't you take me with you? Where rats can go, mice can. I
wouldn't have come back.

L. No, mousie; you would have gone on by yourself, and you might have
waked one of Pasht's cats.[147] and it would have eaten you. I was very
glad you were not there. But after all this, I suppose the imagination
of the heavy granite blocks and the underground ways had troubled me,
and dreams are often shaped in a strange opposition to the impressions
that have caused them; and from all that we had been reading in Bunsen
about stones that couldn't be lifted with levers, I began to dream about
stones that lifted themselves with wings.

SIBYL. Now you must just tell us all about it.

L. I dreamed that I was standing beside the lake, out of whose clay the
bricks were made for the great pyramid of Asychis.[148] They had just
been all finished, and were lying by the lake margin, in long ridges,
like waves. It was near evening; and as I looked towards the sunset, I
saw a thing like a dark pillar standing where the rock of the desert
stoops to the Nile valley. I did not know there was a pillar there, and
wondered at it; and it grew larger, and glided nearer, becoming like the
form of a man, but vast, and it did not move its feet, but glided like a
pillar of sand. And as it drew nearer, I looked by chance past it,
towards the sun; and saw a silver cloud, which was of all the clouds
closest to the sun (and in one place crossed it), draw itself back from
the sun, suddenly. And i