’What happens when you strip the cover off a hornet’s nest?  The raw fact of life is that mankind is just a little lower than the angels, and the conventions are based on that fact in order that men may become angels.  But if you begin, as I did, by the convention that men are angels they will assuredly become bigger beasts than ever.’

‘That,’ I said firmly, ’is altogether out-of-date.  You should have brought a larger mentality, a more vital uplift, and—­er—­all that sort of thing, to bear on—­all that sort of thing, you know.’

‘I did,’ said Ahkenaton gloomily.  ‘It broke me!’ And he, too, went dumb among the ruins.

There is a valley of rocks and stones in every shade of red and brown, called the Valley of the Kings, where a little oil-engine coughs behind its hand all day long, grinding electricity to light the faces of dead Pharaohs a hundred feet underground.  All down the valley, during the tourist season, stand char-a-bancs and donkeys and sand-carts, with here and there exhausted couples who have dropped out of the processions and glisten and fan themselves in some scrap of shade.  Along the sides of the valley are the tombs of the kings neatly numbered, as it might be mining adits with concrete steps leading up to them, and iron grilles that lock of nights, and doorkeepers of the Department of Antiquities demanding the proper tickets.  One enters, and from deeps below deeps hears the voices of dragomans booming through the names and titles of the illustrious and thrice-puissant dead.  Rock-cut steps go down into hot, still darkness, passages-twist and are led over blind pits which, men say, the wise builders childishly hoped would be taken for the real tombs by thieves to come.  Up and down these alley-ways clatter all the races of Europe with a solid backing of the United States.  Their footsteps are suddenly blunted on the floor of a hall paved with immemorial dust that will never dance in any wind.  They peer up at the blazoned ceilings, stoop down to the minutely decorated walls, crane and follow the sombre splendours of a cornice, draw in their breaths and climb up again to the fierce sunshine to re-dive into the next adit on their programme.  What they think proper to say, they say aloud—­and some of it is very interesting.  What they feel you can guess from a certain haste in their movements—­something between the shrinking modesty of a man under fire and the Hadn’t-we-better-be-getting-on attitude of visitors to a mine.  After all, it is not natural for man to go underground except for business or for the last time.  He is conscious of the weight of mother-earth overhead, and when to her expectant bulk is added the whole beaked, horned, winged, and crowned hierarchy of a lost faith flaming at every turn of his eye, he naturally wishes to move away.  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.