Even The Sight Of A Very Great King Indeed, Sarcophagused Under
Electric Light In A Hall Full Of Most Fortifying Pictures, Does Not Hold
Him Too Long.
Some men assert that the crypt of St. Peter's, with only nineteen
centuries bearing down on the groining, and the tombs of early popes and
kings all about, is more impressive than the Valley of the Kings
because it explains how and out of what an existing creed grew.
But the
Valley of the Kings explains nothing except that most terrible line in
Macbeth:
To the last syllable of recorded time.
Earth opens her dry lips and says it.
In one of the tombs there is a little chamber whose ceiling, probably
because of a fault in the rock, could not be smoothed off like the
others. So the decorator, very cunningly, covered it with a closely
designed cloth-pattern - just such a chintz-like piece of stuff as, in
real life, one would use to underhang a rough roof with. He did it
perfectly, down there in the dark, and went his way. Thousands of years
later, there was born a man of my acquaintance who, for good and
sufficient reason, had an almost insane horror of anything in the nature
of a ceiling-cloth. He used to make excuses for not going into the dry
goods shops at Christmas, when hastily enlarged annexes are hidden, roof
and sides, with embroideries. Perhaps a snake or a lizard had dropped on
his mother from the roof before he was born; perhaps it was the memory
of some hideous fever-bout in a tent.
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