the summits, illumined
to the point of dazzling, rise up in the light--like red cinders of a
glowing fire, splendours of living coal, against the pure indigo that
turns almost to darkness. We seem to be walking in some valley of the
Apocalypse with flaming walls. Silence and death, beneath a transcendent
clearness, in the constant radiance of a kind of mournful apotheosis--it
was such surroundings as these that the Egyptians chose for their
necropoles.

The pathway plunges deeper and deeper in the stifling defiles, and
at the end of this "Valley of the Kings," under the sun now nearly
meridian, which grows each minute more mournful and terrible, we
expected to come upon a dread silence. But what is this?

At a turning, beyond there, at the bottom of a sinister-looking recess,
what does this crowd of people, what does this uproar mean? Is it a
meeting, a fair? Under awnings to protect them from the sun stand some
fifty donkeys, saddled in the English fashion. In a corner an electrical
workshop, built of new bricks, shoots forth the black smoke, and all
about, between the high blood-coloured walls, coming and going, making a
great stir and gabbling to their hearts' content, are a number of Cook's
tourists of both sexes, and some even who verily seem to have no sex
at all. They are come for the royal audience; some on asses, some in
jaunting cars, and some, the stout ladies who are grown short of wind,
in chairs carried by the Bedouins. From the four points of Europe they
have assembled in this desert ravine to see an old dried-up corpse at
the bottom of a hole.

Here and there the hidden palaces reveal their dark, square-shaped
entrances, hewn in the massive rock, and over each a board indicates the
name of a kingly mummy--Ramses IV., Seti I., Thothmes III., Ramses IX.,
etc. Although all these kings, except Amenophis II., have recently been
removed and carried away to Lower Egypt, to people the glass cases of
the museum of Cairo, their last dwellings have not ceased to attract
crowds. From each underground habitation are emerging now a number of
perspiring Cooks and Cookesses. And from that of Amenophis, especially,
they issue rapidly. Suppose that we have come too late and that the
audience is over!

And to think that these entrances had been walled up, had been masked
with so much care, and lost for centuries! And of all the perseverance
that was needed to discover them, the observation, the gropings, the
soundings