And These "Forms" Are Like Unto Dead Bodies, And
Sometimes To Strange Beasts, Even To Beasts That Crawl.
And, after
having wandered about the halls, they end by assembling for their
nocturnal conferences on the roofs.
We next ascend a staircase of monumental proportions, empty in the
whole extent, where we are delivered for a little while from the
obsession of those rigid figures, from the stares and smiles of the
good people in white stone and black granite who throng the galleries
and vestibules on the ground floor. None of them, to be sure, will
follow us; but all the same they guard in force and perplex with their
shadows the only way by which we can retreat, if the formidable hosts
above have in store for us too sinister a welcome.
He to whose courtesy I owe the relaxation of the orders of the night
is the illustrious savant to whose care has been entrusted the
direction of the excavations in Egyptian soil; he is also the
comptroller of this vast museum, and it is he himself who has kindly
consented to act as my guide to-night through its mazy labyrinth.
Across the silent halls above we now proceed straight towards those of
whom I have demanded this nocturnal audience.
To-night the succession of these rooms, filled with glass cases, which
cover more than four hundred yards along the four sides of the
building, seems to be without end. After passing, in turn, the papyri,
the enamels, the vases that contain human entrails, we reach the
mummies of the sacred beasts: cats, ibises, dogs, hawks, all with
their mummy cloths and sarcophagi; and monkeys, too, that remain
grotesque even in death. Then commence the human masks, and, upright
in glass-fronted cupboards, the mummy cases in which the body, swathed
in its mummy cloths, was moulded, and which reproduced, more or less
enlarged, the figure of the deceased. Quite a lot of courtesans of the
Greco-Roman epoch, moulded in paste in this wise after death and
crowned with roses, smile at us provokingly from behind their windows.
Masks of the colour of dead flesh alternate with others of gold which
gleam as the light of our lantern plays upon them momentarily in our
rapid passage. Their eyes are always too large, the eyelids too wide
open and the dilated pupils seem to stare at us with alarm. Amongst
these mummy cases and these coffin lids fashioned in the shape of the
human figure, there are some that seem to have been made for giants;
the head especially, beneath its cumbrous head-dress, the head stuffed
as it were between the hunchback shoulders, looks enormous, out of all
proportion to the body which, towards the feet, narrows like a
scabbard.
Although our little lantern maintains its light we seem to see here
less and less: the darkness around us in these vast rooms becomes
almost overpowering - and these are the rooms, too, that, leading one
into the other, facilitate the midnight promenade of those dread
"forms" which, every evening, are released and roam about.
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