harvesting, corn-threshing, storage, and dough-kneading should not be rehearsed.  Clothing, ornaments, and furniture served in like manner as a pretext for the introduction of spinners, weavers, goldsmiths, and cabinet-makers.  The master is of superhuman proportions, and towers above his people and his cattle.  Some prophetic tableaux show him in his funeral bark, speeding before the wind with all sail set, having started on his way to the next world the very day that he takes possession of his new abode (fig. 128).  Elsewhere, we see him as actively superintending his imaginary vassals as formerly he superintended his vassals of flesh and blood (fig. 129).  Varied and irregular as they may appear, these scenes are not placed at random upon the walls.  They all converge towards that semblance of a door which was supposed to communicate with the interior of the tomb.  Those nearest to the door represent the sacrifice and the offering; the earlier stages of preparation and preliminary work being depicted in retrograde order as that door is left farther and farther behind.  At the door itself, the figure of the master seems to await his visitors and bid them welcome.

[Illustration:  Fig. 130.  Plan of serdab in mastaba at Gizeh, Fourth Dynasty.]

The details are of infinite variety.  The inscriptions run to a less or greater length according to the caprice of the scribe; the false door loses its architectural character, and is frequently replaced by a mere stela engraved with the name and rank of the master; yet, whether large or small, whether richly decorated or not decorated at all, the chapel is always the dining-room—­or, rather, the larder—­to which the dead man has access when he feels hungry.

[Illustration:  Fig. 131.—­Plan of serdab and chapel in mastaba of Rahotep at Sakkarah, Fourth Dynasty.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 132.—­Plan of serdab and chapel in mastaba of Thenti I. at Sakkarah, Fourth Dynasty.]

On the other side of the wall was constructed a hiding-place in the form of either a high and narrow cell, or a passage without outlet.  To this hiding-place archaeologists have given the Arab name of “serdab.”  Most mastabas contain but one; others contain three or four (fig. 130).  These serdabs communicated neither with each other nor with the chapel; and are, as it were, buried in the masonry (fig. 131).  If connected at all with the outer world, it is by means of an aperture in the wall about as high up as a man’s head (fig. 132), and so small that the hand can with difficulty pass through it.  To this orifice came the priests, with murmured prayers and perfumes of incense.  Within lurked the Double, ready to profit by these memorial rites, or to accept them through the medium of his statues.  As when he lived upon earth, the man needed a body in which to exist.  His corpse, disfigured by the process of embalmment, bore but a distant resemblance to its former self.  The mummy, again, was destructible,