Here and there the hidden palaces reveal their dark, square-shaped entrances, hewn in the massive rock, and over each a board indicates the name of a kingly mummy—­Ramses IV., Seti I., Thothmes III., Ramses IX., etc.  Although all these kings, except Amenophis II., have recently been removed and carried away to Lower Egypt, to people the glass cases of the museum of Cairo, their last dwellings have not ceased to attract crowds.  From each underground habitation are emerging now a number of perspiring Cooks and Cookesses.  And from that of Amenophis, especially, they issue rapidly.  Suppose that we have come too late and that the audience is over!

And to think that these entrances had been walled up, had been masked with so much care, and lost for centuries!  And of all the perseverance that was needed to discover them, the observation, the gropings, the soundings and random discoveries!

But now they are being closed.  We loitered too long around the colossi of Memnon and the palaces of the plain.  It is nearly noon, a noon consuming and mournful, which falls perpendicularly upon the red summits, and is burning to its deepest recesses the valley of stone.

At the door of Amenophis we have to cajole, beseech.  By the help of a gratuity the Bedouin Grand Master of Ceremonies allows himself to be persuaded.  We are to descend with him, but quickly, quickly, for the electric light will soon be extinguished.  It will be a short audience, but at least it will be a private one.  We shall be alone with the king.

In the darkness, where at first, after so much sunlight, the little electric lamps seem to us scarcely more than glow-worms, we expected a certain amount of chilliness as in the undergrounds of our climate.  But here there is only a more oppressive heat, stifling and withering, and we long to return to the open air, which was burning indeed, but was at least the air of life.

Hastily we descend:  by steep staircases, by passages which slope so rapidly that they hurry us along of themselves, like slides; and it seems that we shall never ascend again, any more than the great mummy who passed here so long ago on his way to his eternal chamber.  All this brings us, first of all, to a deep well—­dug there to swallow up the desecrators in their passage—­and it is on one of the sides of this oubliette, behind a casual stone carefully sealed, that the continuation of these funeral galleries was discovered.  Then, when we have passed the well, by a narrow bridge that has been thrown across it, the stairs begin again, and the steep passages that almost make you run; but now, by a sharp bend, they have changed their direction.  And still we descend, descend.  Heavens! how deep down this king dwells!  And at each step of our descent we feel more and more imprisoned under the sovereign mass of stone, in the centre of all this compact and silent thickness.

*****