tomb were almost insupportable and caused great difficulty to the excavators.  When the sarcophagus-chamber was at length reached, it was found to contain the empty sarcophagi of Thothmes I and of Hatshepsu.  The bodies had been removed for safe-keeping in the time of the XXIst Dynasty, that of Thothmes I having been found with those of Set!  I and Ramses II in the famous pit at Der el-Bahari, which was discovered by M. Maspero in 1881.  Thothmes I seems to have had another and more elaborate tomb (No. 38) in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, which was discovered by M. Loret in 1898.  Its frescoes had been destroyed by the infiltration of water.

The fashion of royal burial in the great valley behind Der el-Bahari was followed during the XVIIIth, XIXth, and XXth Dynasties.  Here in the eastern branch of the Wadiyen, now called the Biban el-Muluk, “the Tombs of the Kings,” the greater number of the mightiest Theban Pharaohs were buried.  In the western valley rested two of the kings of the XVIIIth Dynasty, who desired even more remote burial-places, Amenhetep III and Ai.  The former chose for his last home a most kingly site.  Ancient kings had raised great pyramids of artificial stone over their graves.  Amenhetep, perhaps the greatest and most powerful Pharaoh of them all, chose to have a natural pyramid for his grave, a mountain for his tumulus.  The illustration shows us the tomb of this monarch, opening out of the side of one of the most imposing hills in the Western Valley.  No other king but Amenhetep rested beneath this hill, which thus marks his grave and his only.

It is in the Eastern Valley, the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings properly speaking, that the tombs of Thothmes I and Hatshepsu lie, and here the most recent discoveries have been made.  It is a desolate spot.  As we come over the hill from Der el-Bahari we see below us in the glaring sunshine a rocky canon, with sides sometimes sheer cliff, sometimes sloped by great falls of rock in past ages.  At the bottom of these slopes the square openings of the many royal tombs can be descried. [See illustration.] Far below we see the forms of tourists and the tomb-guards accompanying them, moving in and out of the openings like ants going in and out of an ants’ nest.  Nothing is heard but the occasional cry of a kite and the ceaseless rhythmical throbbing of the exhaust-pipe of the electric light engine in the unfinished tomb of Ramses XI.  Above and around are the red desert hills.  The Egyptians called it “The Place of Eternity.”

[Illustration:  350.jpg THE TOMB-MOUNTAIN OF AMENHETEF III, IN THE WESTERN VALLEY, THEBES.]