It is indeed ironical in our Ali Baba’s cave to see sheer everydayness and hardness upon the screen, the audience dragged back to the street they have escaped.  One of the inventions to bring the twilight of the gathering into brotherhood with the shadows on the screen is a simple thing known to the trade as the fadeaway, that had its rise in a commonplace fashion as a method of keeping the story from ending with the white glare of the empty screen.  As a result of the device the figures in the first episode emerge from the dimness and in the last one go back into the shadow whence they came, as foam returns to the darkness of an evening sea.  In the imaginative pictures the principle begins to be applied more largely, till throughout the fairy story the figures float in and out from the unknown, as fancies should.  This method in its simplicity counts more to keep the place an Ali Baba’s cave than many a more complicated procedure.  In luxurious scenes it brings the soft edges of Correggio, and in solemn ones a light and shadow akin to the effects of Rembrandt.

Now we have a darkness on which we can paint, an unspoiled twilight.  We need not call it the Arabian’s cave.  There is a tomb we might have definitely in mind, an Egyptian burying-place where with a torch we might enter, read the inscriptions, and see the illustrations from the Book of the Dead on the wall, or finding that ancient papyrus in the mummy-case, unroll it and show it to the eager assembly, and have the feeling of return.  Man is an Egyptian first, before he is any other type of civilized being.  The Nile flows through his heart.  So let this cave be Egypt, let us incline ourselves to revere the unconscious memories that echo within us when we see the hieroglyphics of Osiris, and Isis.  Egypt was our long brooding youth.  We built the mysteriousness of the Universe into the Pyramids, carved it into every line of the Sphinx.  We thought always of the immemorial.

The reel now before us is the mighty judgment roll dealing with the question of our departure in such a way that any man who beholds it will bear the impress of the admonition upon his heart forever.  Those Egyptian priests did no little thing, when amid their superstitions they still proclaimed the Judgment.  Let no one consider himself ready for death, till like the men by the Nile he can call up every scene, face with courage every exigency of the ordeal.

There is one copy of the Book of the Dead of especial interest, made for the Scribe Ani, with exquisite marginal drawings.  Copies may be found in our large libraries.  The particular fac-simile I had the honor to see was in the Lenox Library, New York, several years ago.  Ani, according to the formula of the priesthood, goes through the adventures required of a shade before he reaches the court of Osiris.  All the Egyptian pictures on tomb-wall and temple are but enlarged picture-writing made into tableaus.  Through such tableaus Ani moves.  The Ani manuscript has so fascinated some of the Egyptologists that it is copied in figures fifteen feet high on the walls of two of the rooms of the British Museum.  And you can read the story eloquently told in Maspero.