dreary-sunny, if stony and sandy. Ah! Osiris, royal death is the brief, brilliant desert between the temple palace and the temple tomb.

We saw several of these thoughtful Thebans, vapory shadows, musing upon the solitary rocks as we advanced. Presently we were embosomed in the hills. They were only barren and blazing, not at all awful or imposing, being too low and perpendicular. Besides, the rock of which they are composed, is like a petrified sponge, and looks waterworn, which it is not, and unenduring. To-day the sun was especially genial, seeming to consider the visiting the tombs of kings a very cheerful business. So he shone ever more brilliant and burningly, and, in the mazes of the spongy rock, caught the Howadji, and ogled them with the glaring fierceness of a lion's lust and hate.

“These were kings

"Ho, ho!" scoffed the sun. of men, and great gods, and leviathans in the land. They must lie apart from others in the tomb, and be sweet and separate for eternity. And up to this warm, winding way, a little after they had come hither dead, I saw Cambyses and his proud Persians rushing, broad alive, and after them, an endless host of kings, travellers, scholars, snobs, cockneys, and all other beasts and birds of prey, and Cambyses to the latest shopman broke into the select society, shivered

their porphyry sarcophagi, scattered and robbed and despoiled, sending away hands, feet, heads, and all cherished and sacred jewels and talismans, and now I cannot distinguish the dust of Amun-neit-gori, or Osirei, or Thothmes from the sand of the hills. "Kings!" scoffed the sun. "Here's a royal shinbone-the shin of a real Theban king. You may buy it for a pound to-day, if it were not sold for a shilling yesterday, and for a farthing if you'll give no more. The ring in his slave's ear, in the plebeian tombs, is worth a hundred of it."

Vainly, a thoughtful Theban, that lingered almost invisible in the intense light along the defile, suggested to the sun, that royalty was never held of the body—that monarchs and monarchies were only instruments and institutions-that the whole world was a convention, and virtue a draft upon heaven. The sun would gibe his gibe.

"Ho, ho! kings' shins, going, going! kings' hands and feet, who bids? Not a para from

any of the crowd who sell their souls every day to kiss the hands and feet of some sort of royalty, the world over. Ho, ho, ho, kings!"

He scoffed so fervently

What a diabolical sun! that the Howadji grew very silent, having previously thought it rather a good thing to show a mummy at home, that they had found in the kings'

tombs at Thebes. But with that sun glaring out of the sky, who could dare? So they crept very humbly on, deftly defying him and warding off sunstrokes with huge, heavy umbrellas of two thicknesses of blue cotton, and, consequently, constantly on the point of melting and dripping down the donkeys' sides, while the spectral sponge-rock echoed the chirrups of the donkey-boys mockingly. "Ah! my young gentlemen travel a long way to see tombs. But you will have enough of them one day, young gentlemen. What stands at the end of all your journeying?" The abashed Howadji crept still silently along, and reached, at length, the end of the tortuous, stony valley, in the heart of the Libyan hills.

Here was high society. If the field of the cloth of gold is famed because two live kings met there, what shall this assembly of numberless dead kings, and kings only, be? No squires here, no henchmen or courtiers. Nothing but the pure dust here. All around us, the low square doors, sculptured in the hill-bases, open into their presence-chambers. Nor any gold stick in waiting, nor lord high chamberlain to present us. What democracy so democratic as the congregation of dead kings? Let us descend. Even you and I, O Pacha, are as good as many dead kings. And is not Verde Giovane, himself, equal to

x, or an unknown quantity of them? The runaway Mohammed who returned penitent at Syene, shall officiate as chamberlain with the torch-crate.

Now down-but hold!—The kings are not there. They are in the Vatican, in the Louvre, in London, at Berlin, at Vienna, in choice museums, and scattered undistinguished upon the rocks. The master of the house being out, of course you will not en

ter.

What are

Leave them to museums and histories. they to us? Their tombs, not themselves, are our shrines to-day. Ramses's tomb is at this moment of greater moment to us than his whole life. Were he sitting now on Memnon's pedestal, would the Howadji sacrifice seeing his tomb to seeing him?

XXXVIII.

BURIED.

THE Howadji descended into the tomb. It is the trump tomb of the kings' valley, and is named Belzoni, from the traveller. The peasants observed the ground sinking at this point of the hill, and suggested as much to Dr. Rüppell. But Germania, though sure, is slow, and while the Doctor whiffed meditative meerschaums over it, Belzoni opened it, thereby linking his name with one of the most perfect of Theban remains.

We went perpendicularly down a range of shattered stone steps, and, entering the tomb, advanced through a passage still sloping downward. The walls were covered with hieroglyphs fresh as of yesterday. They are a most graceful ornament in their general impression, although the details are always graceless, excepting the figures of birds, which in all Egyptian sculptures are singularly lifelike. In the wall and ceiling painting of these tomb-passages is the germ of the arabesques of the