s what happened to his
_double_. Unaccustomed to any kind of noise, after three or four hundred
years passed in the company of certain familiars, lulled in the same
heavy slumber as himself, he heard the sound of muffled blows in the
distance, by the side of the hidden well. The secret entrance was
discovered: men were breaking through its walls! Living beings were
about to appear, pillagers of tombs, no doubt, come to unswathe them
all! But no! Only some priests of Osiris, advancing with fear in a
funeral procession. They brought nine great coffins containing the
mummies of nine kings, his sons, grandsons and other unknown successors,
down to that King Setnakht, who governed Egypt two and a half centuries
after him. It was simply to hide them better that they brought them
hither, and placed them all together in a chamber that was immediately
walled up. Then they departed. The stones of the door were sealed
afresh, and everything fell again into the old mournful and burning
darkness.

Slowly the centuries rolled on--perhaps ten, perhaps twenty--in a
silence no longer even disturbed by the scratchings of the worms, long
since dead. And a day came when, at the side of the entrance, the same
blows were heard again. . . . And this time it was the robbers. Carrying
torches in their hands, they rushed headlong in, with shouts and cries
and, except in the safe hiding-place of the nine coffins, everything was
plundered, the bandages torn off, the golden trinkets snatched from
the necks of the mummies. Then, when they had sorted their booty,
they walled up the entrance as before, and went their way, leaving an
inextricable confusion of shrouds, of human bodies, of entrails issuing
from shattered vases, of broken gods and emblems.

Afterwards, for long centuries, there was silence again, and finally,
in our days, the _double_, then in its last weakness and almost
non-existent, perceived the same noise of stones being unsealed by blows
of pickaxes. The third time, the living men who entered were of a race
never seen before. At first they seemed respectful and pious, only
touching things gently. But they came to plunder everything, even the
nine coffins in their still inviolate hiding-place. They gathered the
smallest fragments with a solicitude almost religious. That they might
lose nothing they even sifted the rubbish and the dust. But, as for
Amenophis, who was already nothing more than a lamentable mummy, without
jewels or ba