We are there at last, admitted at this unseasonable hour into the guest-chamber of kings and queens, for an audience that is private indeed.

And there, first of all, is the woman with the baby, upon whom, without stopping, we throw the light of our lantern.  A woman who died in giving to the world a little dead prince.  Since the old embalmers no one has seen the face of this Queen Makeri.  In her coffin there she is simply a tall female figure, outlined beneath the close-bound swathings of brown-coloured bandages.  At her feet lies the fatal baby, grotesquely shrivelled, and veiled and mysterious as the mother herself; a sort of doll, it seems, put there to keep her eternal company in the slow passing of endless years.

More fearsome to approach is the row of unswathed mummies that follow.  Here, in each coffin over which we bend, there is a face which stares at us—­or else closes its eyes in order that it may not see us; and meagre shoulders and lean arms, and hands with overgrown nails that protrude from miserable rags.  And each royal mummy that our lantern lights reserves for us a fresh surprise and the shudder of a different fear—­they resemble one another so little.  Some of them seem to laugh, showing their yellow teeth; others have an expression of infinite sadness and suffering.  Sometimes the faces are small, refined and still beautiful despite the pinching of the nostrils; sometimes they are excessively enlarged by putrid swelling, with the tip of the nose eaten away.  The embalmers, we know, were not sure of their means, and the mummies were not always a success.  In some cases putrefaction ensued, and corruption and even sudden hatchings of larvae, those “companions without ears and without eyes,” which died indeed in time but only after they had perforated all the flesh.

Hard by are ranked according to dynasty, and in chronological order, the proud Pharaohs in a piteous row:  father, son, grandson, great-grandson.  And common paper tickets tell their tremendous names, Seti I., Ramses II., Seti II., Ramses III., Ramses IV. . . .  Soon the muster will be complete, with such energy have men dug in the heart of the rocks to find them all; and these glass cases will no doubt be their final resting-place.  In olden days, however, they made many pilgrimages after their death, for in the troubled times of the history of Egypt it was one of the harassing preoccupations of the reigning sovereign to hide, to hide at all costs, the mummies of his ancestors, which filled the earth increasingly, and which the violators of tombs were so swift to track.  Then they were carried clandestinely from one grave to another, raised each from his own pompous sepulchre, to be buried at last together in some humble and less conspicuous vault.  But it is here, in this museum of Egyptian antiquities, that they are about to accomplish their return to dust, which has been deferred, as if by miracle, for so many centuries.  Now, stripped of their bandages, their days are numbered, and it behoves us to hasten to draw these physiognomies of three or four thousand years ago, which are about to perish.