en days, however, they made many pilgrimages after
their death, for in the troubled times of the history of Egypt it was
one of the harassing preoccupations of the reigning sovereign to hide,
to hide at all costs, the mummies of his ancestors, which filled the
earth increasingly, and which the violators of tombs were so swift to
track. Then they were carried clandestinely from one grave to another,
raised each from his own pompous sepulchre, to be buried at last
together in some humble and less conspicuous vault. But it is here, in
this museum of Egyptian antiquities, that they are about to accomplish
their return to dust, which has been deferred, as if by miracle, for
so many centuries. Now, stripped of their bandages, their days are
numbered, and it behoves us to hasten to draw these physiognomies of
three or four thousand years ago, which are about to perish.

In that coffin--the last but one of the row on the left--it is the great
Sesostris himself who awaits us. We know of old that face of ninety
years, with its nose hooked like the beak of a falcon; and the gaps
between those old man's teeth; the meagre, birdlike neck, and the hand
raised in a gesture of menace. Twenty years have elapsed since he was
brought back to the light, this master of the world. He was wrapped
_thousands of times_ in a marvellous winding-sheet, woven of aloe
fibres, finer than the muslin of India, which must have taken years in
the making and measured more than 400 yards in length. The unswathing,
done in the presence of the Khedive Tewfik and the great personages of
Egypt, lasted two hours, and after the last turn, when the illustrious
figure appeared, the emotion amongst the assistants was such that they
stampeded like a herd of cattle, and the Pharaoh was overturned. He has,
moreover, given much cause for conversation, this great Sesostris, since
his installation in the museum. Suddenly one day with a brusque gesture,
in the presence of the attendants, who fled howling with fear, he raised
that hand which is still in the air, and which he has not deigned since
to lower.[*] And subsequently there supervened, beginning in the old
yellowish-white hair, and then swarming over the whole body, a hatching
of cadaveric fauna, which necessitated a complete bath in mercury. He
also has his paper ticket, pasted on the end of his box, and one may
read there, written in a careless hand, that name which once caused the
whole world to tremble--"Ramses I