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.  At any rate, that man’s idea of The Torment was a hot, crowded underground room, underhung with patterned cloths.  Once in his life at a city in the far north, where he had to make a speech, he met that perfect combination.  They led him up and down narrow, crowded, steam-heated passages, till they planted him at last in a room without visible windows (by which he knew he was, underground), and directly beneath a warm-patterned ceiling-cloth—­rather like a tent-lining.  And there he had to say his say, while panic terror sat in his throat.  The second time was in the Valley of the Kings, where very similar passages, crowded with people, led him into a room cut of rock, fathoms underground, with what looked like a sagging chintz cloth not three feet above his head.  The man I’d like to catch,’ he said when he came outside again, ’is that decorator-man.  D’you suppose he meant to produce that effect?’

Every man has his private terrors, other than those of his own conscience.  From what I saw in the Valley of the Kings, the Egyptians seem to have known this some time ago.  They certainly have impressed it on most unexpected people.  I heard two voices down a passage talking together as follows: 

She.  I guess we weren’t ever meant to see these old tombs from inside, anyway.

He.  How so?

She.  For one thing, they believe so hard in being dead.  Of course, their outlook on spiritual things wasn’t as broad as ours.

He.  Well, there’s no danger of our being led away by it.  Did you buy that alleged scarab off the dragoman this morning?