Egypt and its monuments . in Egypt, both thepeople and the desert seem gentler, safer, more these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolationof the sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and asyou wander from tomb to tomb, descending and ascend-ing, stealing through great galleries beneath the sands,creeping through tubes of stone, crouching almost onhands and knees in the sultry chambers of the dead, theawfulness of the passing away of dynasties and of racescomes, like a cloud, upon your spirit. But this cloudlifts and floats from you in the cheerful tomb of Thi,that royal counc
Egypt and its monuments . in Egypt, both thepeople and the desert seem gentler, safer, more these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolationof the sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and asyou wander from tomb to tomb, descending and ascend-ing, stealing through great galleries beneath the sands,creeping through tubes of stone, crouching almost onhands and knees in the sultry chambers of the dead, theawfulness of the passing away of dynasties and of racescomes, like a cloud, upon your spirit. But this cloudlifts and floats from you in the cheerful tomb of Thi,that royal councilor, that scribe and confidant, whoselife must have been passed in a round of serene ac-tivities, amid a sneering, though doubtless admiring,population. Into this tomb of white, vivacious figures, gay al-most, though never wholly frivolous, for these menwere full of purpose, full of an ardor that seduces evenwhere it seems grotesque, I took with me a child of tencalled Ali, from the village of Kafiah; and as I looked 32. SAKKARA from him to the walls around us, rather than the pass-ing away of the races, I realized the persistence of everywhere I saw the face of little Ali, with everyfeature exactly reproduced. Here he was bending overa sacrifice, leading a sacred bull, feeding geese from acup, roasting a chicken, pulling a boat, carpentering, pol-ishing, conducting a monkey for a walk, or merely sit-ting bolt upright and sneering. There were lines oflittle Alis with their hands held to their breasts, theirfaces in profile, their knees rigid, in the happy tomb ofThi; but he glanced at them unheeding, did not rec-ognize his ancestors. And he did not care to pene-trate into the tombs of Mera and Meri-Ra-ankh, intothe Serapeum and the Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Per-haps he was right. The Serapeum is grand in its vast-ness, with its long and high galleries and its mightyvaults containing the huge granite sarcophagi of thesacred bulls of Apis; Mera, red and white, welcomesyou
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