The bearers of offerings, friends, and slaves passed over on hired barges, whose cabins, covered externally with embroidered stuffs of several colours, or with applique leather, looked like the pedestals of a monument:  crammed together on the boats, they stood upright with their faces turned towards the funeral bark.  The latter was supposed to represent the Noshemit, the mysterious skiff of Abydos, which had been used in the obsequies of Osiris of yore.

[Illustration:  016.jpg the boats containing the friends and the funerary furniture]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from paintings on the tomb of
     Nofirhotpu at Thebes.

It was elegant, light, and slender in shape, and ornamented at bow and stern with a lotus-flower of metal, which bent back its head gracefully, as if bowed down by its own weight.  A temple-shaped shrine stood in the middle of the boat, adorned with bouquets of flowers and with green palm-branches.  The female members of the family of the deceased, crouched beside the shrine, poured forth lamentations, while two priestesses, representing respectively Isis and Nephthys, took up positions behind to protect the body.  The boat containing the female mourners having taken the funeral barge in tow, the entire flotilla pushed out into the stream.  This was the solemn moment of the ceremony—­the moment in which the deceased, torn away from his earthly city, was about to set out upon that voyage from which there is no return.  The crowds assembled on the banks of the river hailed the dead with their parting prayers:  “Mayest thou reach in peace the West from Thebes!  In peace, in peace towards Abydos, mayest thou descend in peace towards Abydos, towards the sea of the West!”

[Illustration:  017.jpg A corner of the Theban necropolis]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a stele in the Gizeh Museum.

This crossing of the Nile was of special significance in regard to the future of the soul of the deceased:  it represented his pilgrimage towards Abydos, to the “Mouth of the Cleft” which gave him access to the other world, and it was for this reason that the name of Abydos is associated with that of Thebes in the exclamations of the crowd.  The voices of the friends replied frequently and mournfully:  “To the West, to the West, the land of the justified!  The place which thou lovedst weeps and is desolate!” Then the female mourners took up the refrain, saying:  “In peace, in peace, to the West!  O honourable one, go in peace!  If it please God, when the day of Eternity shall shine, we shall see thee, for behold thou goest to the land which mingles all men together!” The widow then adds her note to the concert of lamentations:  “O my brother, O my husband, O my beloved, rest, remain in thy place, do not depart from the terrestrial spot where thou art!  Alas, thou goest away to the ferry-boat in order to cross the stream!  O sailors, do not hurry, leave him; you, you will return to your homes, but he, he is going away to the land of Eternity!  O Osirian bark, why hast thou come to take away from me him who has left me!” The sailors were, of course, deaf to her appeals, and the mummy pursued its undisturbed course towards the last stage of its mysterious voyage.