We had the good fortune to stay a while at the Headquarters of the Metropolitan Museum (New York) in a valley riddled like a rabbit-warren with tombs.  Their stables, store-houses, and servants’ quarters are old tombs; their talk is of tombs, and their dream (the diggers’ dream always) is to discover a virgin tomb where the untouched dead lie with their jewels upon them.  Four miles away are the wide-winged, rampant hotels.  Here is nothing whatever but the rubbish of death that died thousands of years ago, on whose grave no green thing has ever grown.  Villages, expert in two hundred generations of grave-robbing, cower among the mounds of wastage, and whoop at the daily tourist.  Paths made by bare feet run from one half-tomb, half-mud-heap to the next, not much more distinct than snail smears, but they have been used since....

Time is a dangerous thing to play with.  That morning the concierge had toiled for us among steamer-sailings to see if we could save three days.  That evening we sat with folk for whom Time had stood still since the Ptolemies.  I wondered, at first, how it concerned them or any man if such and such a Pharaoh had used to his own glory the plinths and columns of such another Pharaoh before or after Melchizedek.  Their whole background was too inconceivably remote for the mind to work on.  But the next morning we were taken to the painted tomb of a noble—­a Minister of Agriculture—­who died four or five thousand years ago.  He said to me, in so many words:  ’Observe I was very like your friend, the late Mr. Samuel Pepys, of your Admiralty.  I took an enormous interest in life, which I most thoroughly enjoyed, on its human and on its spiritual side.  I do not think you will find many departments of State better managed than mine, or a better-kept house, or a nicer set of young people ...  My daughters!  The eldest, as you can see, takes after her mother.  The youngest, my favourite, is supposed to favour me.  Now I will show you all the things that I did, and delighted in, till it was time for me to present my accounts elsewhere.’  And he showed me, detail by detail, in colour and in drawing, his cattle, his horses, his crops, his tours in the district, his accountants presenting the revenue returns, and he himself, busiest of the busy, in the good day.

But when we left that broad, gay ante-room and came to the narrower passage where once his body had lain and where all his doom was portrayed, I could not follow him so well.  I did not see how he, so experienced in life, could be cowed by friezes of brute-headed apparitions or satisfied by files of repeated figures.  He explained, something to this effect: