For the soul used to depart simultaneously under the two forms of a flame[*] and a falcon[+] respectively.  And this country of shadows, called also the west, to which it had to render itself, was that where the moon sinks and where each evening the sun goes down; a country to which the living were never able to attain, because it fled before them, however fast they might travel across the sands or over the waters.  On its arrival there, the scared soul had to parley successively with the fearsome demons who lay in wait for it along its route.  If at last it was judged worthy to approach Osiris, the great Dead Sun, it was subsumed in him and reappeared, shining over the world the next morning and on all succeeding mornings until the consummation of time—­a vague survival in the solar splendour, a continuation without personality, of which one is scarcely able to say whether or not it was more desirable than eternal non-existence.

[*] The Khou, which never returned to our world.

[+] The Bai, which might, at its will, revisit the tomb.

And, moreover, it was necessary to preserve the body at whatever cost, for a certain double of the dead man continued to dwell in the dry flesh, and retained a kind of half life, barely conscious.  Lying at the bottom of the sarcophagus it was able to see, by virtue of those two eyes, which were painted on the lid, always in the same axis as the empty eyes of the mummy.  Sometimes, too, this double, escaping from the mummy and its box, used to wander like a phantom about the hypogeum.  And, in order that at such times it might be able to obtain nourishment, a mass of mummified viands wrapped in bandages were amongst the thousand and one things buried at its side.  Even natron and oils were left, so that it might re-embalm itself, if the worms came to life in its members.

Oh! the persistence of this double, sealed there in the tomb, a prey to anxiety, lest corruption should take hold of it; which had to serve its long duration in suffocating darkness, in absolute silence, without anything to mark the days and nights, or the seasons or the centuries, or the tens of centuries without end!  It was with such a terrible conception of death as this that each one in those days was absorbed in the preparation of his eternal chamber.

And for Amenophis II. this more or less is what happened to his double.  Unaccustomed to any kind of noise, after three or four hundred years passed in the company of certain familiars, lulled in the same heavy slumber as himself, he heard the sound of muffled blows in the distance, by the side of the hidden well.  The secret entrance was discovered:  men were breaking through its walls!  Living beings were about to appear, pillagers of tombs, no doubt, come to unswathe them all!  But no!  Only some priests of Osiris, advancing with fear in a funeral procession.  They brought nine great coffins containing the mummies of nine kings, his sons, grandsons and other unknown successors, down to that King Setnakht, who governed Egypt two and a half centuries after him.  It was simply to hide them better that they brought them hither, and placed them all together in a chamber that was immediately walled up.  Then they departed.  The stones of the door were sealed afresh, and everything fell again into the old mournful and burning darkness.