You go to a door in the rock, and a guardian lets you in, and wants to
follow you in.
Prevent him if you can. Pay him. Go in alone. For this
is the tomb of Amenhotep II.; and he himself is here, far down, at
rest under the mountain, this king who lived and reigned more than
fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. The ravine-valley
leads to him, and you should go to him alone. He lies in the heart of
the living rock, in the dull heat of the earth's bowels, which is like
no other heat. You descend by stairs and corridors, you pass over a
well by a bridge, you pass through a naked chamber; and the king is
not there. And you go on down another staircase, and along another
corridor, and you come into a pillared chamber, with paintings on its
walls, and on its pillars, paintings of the king in the presence of
the gods of the underworld, under stars in a soft blue sky. And below
you, shut in on the farther side by the solid mountain in whose breast
you have all this time been walking, there is a crypt. And you turn
away from the bright paintings, and down there you see the king.
Many years ago in London I went to the private view of the Royal
Academy at Burlington House. I went in the afternoon, when the
galleries were crowded with politicians and artists, with dealers,
gossips, quidnuncs, and /flaneurs/; with authors, fashionable lawyers,
and doctors; with men and women of the world; with young dandies and
actresses /en vogue/. A roar of voices went up to the roof.
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