ows, and underneath the passwords which were to be
given to each of them are recapitulated so as not to be forgotten.

For the soul used to depart simultaneously under the two forms of a
flame[*] and a falcon[+] respectively. And this country of shadows,
called also the west, to which it had to render itself, was that where
the moon sinks and where each evening the sun goes down; a country to
which the living were never able to attain, because it fled before them,
however fast they might travel across the sands or over the waters. On
its arrival there, the scared soul had to parley successively with the
fearsome demons who lay in wait for it along its route. If at last
it was judged worthy to approach Osiris, the great Dead Sun, it was
subsumed in him and reappeared, shining over the world the next morning
and on all succeeding mornings until the consummation of time--a vague
survival in the solar splendour, a continuation without personality, of
which one is scarcely able to say whether or not it was more desirable
than eternal non-existence.

[*] The Khou, which never returned to our world.

[+] The Bai, which might, at its will, revisit the tomb.

And, moreover, it was necessary to preserve the body at whatever cost,
for a certain _double_ of the dead man continued to dwell in the dry
flesh, and retained a kind of half life, barely conscious. Lying at the
bottom of the sarcophagus it was able to see, by virtue of those two
eyes, which were painted on the lid, always in the same axis as the
empty eyes of the mummy. Sometimes, too, this _double_, escaping from
the mummy and its box, used to wander like a phantom about the hypogeum.
And, in order that at such times it might be able to obtain nourishment,
a mass of mummified viands wrapped in bandages were amongst the thousand
and one things buried at its side. Even natron and oils were left,
so that it might re-embalm itself, if the worms came to life in its
members.

Oh! the persistence of this _double_, sealed there in the tomb, a prey
to anxiety, lest corruption should take hold of it; which had to serve
its long duration in suffocating darkness, in absolute silence, without
anything to mark the days and nights, or the seasons or the centuries,
or the tens of centuries without end! It was with such a terrible
conception of death as this that each one in those days was absorbed in
the preparation of his eternal chamber.

And for Amenophis II. this more or less i