thee shall an altar be builded, and an arm-chair erected thereupon. Thereof shall punch-bowls be the vessels, and fragrant latakia the incense. A model god is foxy, alive, active, busy-looking in at the hareem, too, lest they be lonely!

XL.

ET CETERA.

THE mere Theben subjects died, too, and they also had to be buried. Their tombs are in the broad face of the mountains toward the river, and between those of the kings and queens. They command a fairer earthly prospect than those of their royal masters, and, Osiris favoring, their occupants reached the heavenly meads as soon.

The great hillside is honey-combed with these tombs. There is no wonder so wonderful that it shall not be realized, and the Prophet's coffin shall be miraculous no longer; for here the dwellings of the dead overhang the temples and the houses. The romantic Theban could not look at the sunset, but he must needs see tombs and find the sunset too seriously symbolical. Clearly with the Thebans, death was the great end of life.

The patient little donkeys would have tugged us up the steep sand and rock-slope, from the plain of Thebes. But we toiled up on foot through a vil

lage of dust, and barking dogs, and filthy people, inconceivable, and on and higher, through mummyswathings, cast off from rifled mummies and bleaching bones. If a civilized being lived in modern Thebes, he would certainly inhabit a tomb for its greater cleanliness and comfort, and would find it, too, freshly frescoed.

In the kings' tombs, we encountered the unresolvable theological enigmas, with the stately society of gods and heroes. The queens welcomed us in gardens and in barges of pleasure, while timbrels and harps rang, and the slaves danced along the walls, offering fruit and flowers-or would have done so, had they not rejoined their spouses in choice cabinets.

But the plebeians receive us in the midst of their fields and families. The hints of the Harper's tomb are minutely developed in many of the private tombs. Every trade, and the detail of every process of household economy-of the chase, and all other departments of Theban life, are there pictured. Much is gone. The plaster-casing of the rock peels away. Many are caves only. But in some, the whole circle of human labor seems to be pictorially completed.

The social scenes are most interesting. Very graceful is a line of guests smelling the lotus offered

as a welcome; but times change and manners. Pleasant and graceful would it yet be to welcome friends with flowers. But all do not dwell upon rivers, neither are the shores of all rivers lithe with lilies. Haply for modern welcome, a cigar and glass of sherry suffice.

I say graceful, meaning the idea; for upon the walls you would see a very stiff row of stiff figures smelling at stiff flowers. With your merely modern notions, you would probably mistake the lotus for a goblet. Were you an artist, you would cherish the idea until you carved in a cup that graceful flower-form. Figures of musicians, whose harps, and guitars, and tambourines, would seem to you the germs of the tàr and the rabab, would awaken vague visions of Hecate and the old husband. But if you beheld the dancers, infallibly you would slide down three thousand years in a moment, and, musily gazing from the door into the soft morning, your eyes would yearn toward Esne, and even your more-severely regulated heart, memory, mind, or what you will, toward the gay Ghazeeyah and the modest dove.

These tombs, like the rest, are tenantless. At intervals come the scientific and open new ones. The mummy-merchants and Howadji follow and seize the spoils. Time succeeds and preys, though

tenderly, upon the labor of an antiquity that has eluded him; for he was busy in the plain below smoothing the green grave of Thebes. For the tomb of Thebes itself is the freshest and fairest of all. The stars come and go in the ceiling. The wheat waves and is harvested-flowers spring and fade upon the floor. The same processes of life are not repeated, but they are real there. Its tenant, too, has disappeared like the rest-but into no known cabinet.

We emerged from the tombs, and clomb down the hill. A house of unusual pretension, with a swept little court in front, attracted our notice. O traveller! heed not the clean little court; for the figure that sits therein, amply arrayed, sedately smoking as if life were the very vanity of vanities, is the monarch of mummy-merchants, who exacts terrible tribute from the Howadji. A Greek ghoul is he, who lives by the living no less than the dead.

Fix your eye upon Memnon, and follow to the plain. Amble quietly in his sunset-shadow to the shore. The air will sway with ghosts you cannot lay. Dead Thebans from the mountains will glide shadowy over dead Thebes in the plain. Chapless, fallen, forgotten now, we too, were young immortals-we, too, were born in Arcady!