Has resumed his receptions, which he found himself
obliged to suspend for three thousand, three hundred and some odd
years, by reason of his decease.
They are very well attended; court
dress is not insisted upon, and the Grand Master of ceremonies is not
above taking a tip. He holds them every morning in the winter from
eight o'clock, in the bowels of a mountain in the desert of Libya; and
if he rests himself during the remainder of the day it is only
because, as soon as midday sounds, they turn off the electric light.
Happy Amenophis! Out of so many kings who tried so hard to hide for
ever their mummies in the depths of impenetrable caverns he is the
only one who has been left in his tomb. And he "makes the most of it"
every time he opens his funeral salons.
*****
It is important to arrive before midday at the dwelling of this
Pharaoh, and at eight o'clock sharp, therefore, on a clear February
morning, I set out from Luxor, where for many days my dahabiya had
slumbered against the bank of the Nile. It is necessary first of all
to cross the river, for the Theban kings of the Middle Empire all
established their eternal habitations on the opposite bank - far beyond
the plains of the river shore, right away in those mountains which
bound the horizon as with a wall of adorable rose-colour. Other
canoes, which are also crossing, glide by the side of mine on the
tranquil water. The passengers seem to belong to that variety of
Anglo-Saxons which is equipped by Thomas Cook & Sons (Egypt Ltd.), and
like me, no doubt, they are bound for the royal presence.
We land on the sand of the opposite bank, which to-day is almost
deserted. Formerly there stretched here a regular suburb of Thebes -
that, namely, of the preparers of mummies, with thousands of ovens
wherein to heat the natron and the oils, which preserved the bodies
from corruption. In this Thebes, where for some fifty centuries,
everything that died, whether man or beast, was minutely prepared and
swathed in bandages, it will readily be understood what importance
this quarter of the embalmers came to assume. And it was to the
neighbouring mountains that the products of so many careful wrappings
were borne for burial, while the Nile carried away the blood from the
bodies and the filth of their entrails. That chain of living rocks
that rises before us, coloured each morning with the same rose, as of
a tender flower, is literally stuffed with dead bodies.
We have to cross a wide plain before reaching the mountains, and on
our way cornfields alternate with stretches of sand already
desertlike. Behind us extends the old Nile and the opposite bank which
we have lately quitted - the bank of Luxor, whose gigantic Pharaonic
colonnades are as it were lengthened below by their own reflection in
the mirror of the river.
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