to the sepulchral chamber) of enormous depth, down which the modern tourist is enabled to descend by a spiral iron staircase.  The Serapeum itself is lit with electricity, and in the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes nothing disturbs the silence but the steady thumping pulsation of the dynamo-engine which lights the ancient sepulchres of the Pharaohs.  Thus do modern ideas and inventions help us to see and so to understand better the works of ancient Egypt.  But it is perhaps a little too much like the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.  The interiors of the later tombs are often decorated with reliefs which imitate those of the early period, but with a kind of delicate grace which at once marks them for what they are, so that it is impossible to confound them with the genuine ancient originals from which they were adapted.

Riding from Sakkara southwards to Dashur, we pass on the way the gigantic stone mastaba known as the Mastabat el-Fara’un, “Pharaoh’s Bench.”  This was considered to be the tomb of the Vth Dynasty king, Unas, until his pyramid was found by Prof.  Maspero at Sakkara.  From its form it might be thought to belong to a monarch of the Hid Dynasty, but the great size of the stone blocks of which it is built seems to point rather to the XIIth.  All attempts to penetrate its secret by actual excavation have been unavailing.

Further south across the desert we see from the Mastabat el-Fara’un four distinct pyramids, symmetrically arranged in two lines, two in each line.  The two to the right are great stone erections of the usual type, like those of Giza and Abusir, and the southernmost of them has a peculiar broken-backed appearance, due to the alteration of the angle of inclination of its sides during construction.  Further, it is covered almost to the ground by the original casing of polished white limestone blocks, so that it gives a very good idea of the original appearance of the other pyramids, which have lost their casing.  These two pyramids very probably belong to kings of the Hid Dynasty, as does the Step-Pyramid of Sakkara.  They strongly resemble the Giza type, and the northernmost of the two looks very like an understudy of the Great Pyramid.  It seems to mark the step in the development of the royal pyramid which was immediately followed by the Great Pyramid.  But no excavations have yet proved the accuracy of this view.  Both pyramids have been entered, but nothing has been found in them.  It is very probable that one of them is the second pyramid of Snefru.

The other two pyramids, those nearest the cultivation, are of very different appearance.  They are half-ruined, they are black in colour, and their whole effect is quite different from that of the stone pyramids.  For they are built of brick, not of stone.  They are pyramids, it is true, but of a different material and of a different date from those which we have been describing.  They are built above the sepulchres of kings of the XIIth Dynasty, the Theban house which