itted on all sides with gaping holes. It looks like
some region that had long been undermined by burrowing beasts. But it is
men who, for more than fifty centuries, have vexed this ground, first
to hide the mummies in it, and afterwards, and until our day, to exhume
them. Each of these holes has enclosed its corpse, and if you peer
within you may see yellow-coloured rags still trailing there; and
bandages, or legs and vertebrae of thousands of years ago. Some lean
Bedouins, who exercise the office of excavators, and sleep hard by in
holes like jackals, advance to sell us scarabaei, blue-glass trinkets
that are half fossilised, and feet or hands of the dead.

And now farewell to the fresh morning. Every minute the heat becomes
more oppressive. The pathway that is marked only by a row of stones
turns at last and leads into the depths of the mountain by a tragical
passage. We enter now into that "Valley of the Kings" which was the
place of the last rendezvous of the most august mummies. The breaths of
air that reach us between these rocks are become suddenly burning, and
the site seems to belong no longer to earth but to some calcined planet
which had for ever lost its clouds and atmosphere. This Libyan chain,
in the distance so delicately rose, is positively frightful now that
it overhangs us. It looks what it is--an enormous and fantastic tomb, a
natural necropolis, whose vastness and horror nothing human could
equal, an ideal stove for corpses that wanted to endure for ever.
The limestone, on which for that matter no rain ever falls from the
changeless sky, looks to be in one single piece from summit to base, and
betrays no crack or crevice by which anything might penetrate into the
sepulchres within. The dead could sleep, therefore, in the heart of
these monstrous blocks as sheltered as under vaults of lead. And of what
there is of magnificence the centuries have taken care. The continual
passage of winds laden with dust has scaled and worn away the face of
the rocks, so as to leave only the denser veins of stone, and thus
have reappeared strange architectural fantasies such as Matter, in the
beginning, might have dimly conceived. Subsequently the sun of Egypt has
lavished on the whole its ardent reddish patines. And now the mountains
imitate in places great organ-pipes, badigeoned with yellow and carmine,
and elsewhere huge bloodstained skeletons and masses of dead flesh.

Outlined upon the excessive blue of the sky,