The StJames's magazine and United Empire review . One ofmy friends, stumbling with force, displaced a mummy, which pro-bably had lain on its slab for thousands of years, and had becomedry and brittle as tinder; the head snapped, nodded, and rolled at 522 ON THE NILE. his feet. We were, in fact, in one of the hundreds of mummy-pits that honeycomb the mountains overlooking the plain of thegreat city, whose people, from king to slave, sleep alike, rolled, asin mockery of death, in one vast mausoleum of nature. I need hardly say how glad I was to escape from this dark abodeof death into the bright
The StJames's magazine and United Empire review . One ofmy friends, stumbling with force, displaced a mummy, which pro-bably had lain on its slab for thousands of years, and had becomedry and brittle as tinder; the head snapped, nodded, and rolled at 522 ON THE NILE. his feet. We were, in fact, in one of the hundreds of mummy-pits that honeycomb the mountains overlooking the plain of thegreat city, whose people, from king to slave, sleep alike, rolled, asin mockery of death, in one vast mausoleum of nature. I need hardly say how glad I was to escape from this dark abodeof death into the bright sunshine, and to breathe the air of outerday once more. It is curious to think that these ghastly objectslived, thought, acted, and died hundreds—may I not say thousands?—of years before the Saviour trod this earth! The practice ofcmbalment, or mummification, is almost as old as the beginning ofthe Israelitish race. With spirits as unflagging as the sun was burning, at length wearrived at the beautiful old temple-palace of Memnon. Its halls. TEMTLE OF MEMNON, THEBES. and chambers, of the lightest and most symmetrical architecture,are supported by columns of colossal statues representing theEgyptian monarchs. Amid the ruins, so beautiful in their fall,lies the stupendous statue of Rameses, just as when the fury of thePersian invaders first cast down this memorial of Egyptian gran-deur, now strewing the plain with its tremendous fragments. Thesurprising force of its downfall is evinced by the shivered throneand the almost shapeless image of the colossal king. How the oldEgyptians could transport this mass of sculpture, weighing between800 and 900 tons, 124 miles, all the way from Assouan, as they ON THE NILE. must have done, and then erect it in all its huge dimensions onthis spot, is to me still a matter of the greatest wonder; and themeans of its destruction must have been almost equally wonderful,since the force of gunpowder was probably unknown at the timewhen the work o
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