The little electric globes, placed apart like a garland, suffice now for our eyes which have forgotten the sun.  And we can distinguish around us myriad figures inviting us to solemnity and silence.  They are inscribed everywhere on the smooth, spotless walls of the colour of old ivory.  They follow one another in regular order, repeating themselves obstinately in parallel rows, as if the better to impose upon our spirit, with gestures and symbols that are eternally the same.  The gods and demons, the representatives of Anubis, with his black jackal’s head and his long erect ears, seem to make signs to us with their long arms and long fingers:  “No noise!  Look, there are mummies here!” The wonderful preservation of all this, the vivid colours, the clearness of the outlines, begin to cause a kind of stupor and bewilderment.  Verily you would think that the painter of these figures of the shades had only just quitted the hypogeum.  All this past seems to draw you to itself like an abyss to which you have approached too closely.  It surrounds you, and little by little masters you.  It is so much at home here that it has remained the present.  Over and above the mere descent into the secret bowels of the rock there has been a kind of seizure with vertigo, which we had not anticipated and which has whirled us far away into the depths of the ages.

These interminable, oppressive passages, by which we have crawled to the innermost depths of the mountain, lead at length to something vast, the walls divide, the vault expands and we are in the great funeral hall, of which the blue ceiling, all bestrewn with stars like the sky, is supported by six pillars hewn in the rock itself.  On either side open other chambers into which the electricity permits us to see quite clearly, and opposite, at the end of the hall, a large crypt is revealed, which one divines instinctively must be the resting-place of the Pharaoh.  What a prodigious labour must have been entailed by this perforation of the living rock!  And this hypogeum is not unique.  All along the “Valley of the Kings” little insignificant doors—­which to the initiated reveal the “Sign of the Shadow,” inscribed on their lintels—­lead to other subterranean places, just as sumptuous and perfidiously profound, with their snares, their hidden wells, their oubliettes and the bewildering multiplicity of their mural figures.  And all these tombs this morning were full of people, and, if we had not had the good fortune to arrive after the usual hour, we should have met here, even in this dwelling of Amenophis, a battalion equipped by Messrs. Cook.

In this hall, with its blue ceiling, the frescoes multiply their riddles:  scenes from the book of Hades, all the funeral ritual translated into pictures.  On the pillars and walls crowd the different demons that an Egyptian soul was likely to meet in its passage through the country of shadows, and underneath the passwords which were to be given to each of them are recapitulated so as not to be forgotten.