Slowly the centuries rolled on—­perhaps ten, perhaps twenty—­in a silence no longer even disturbed by the scratchings of the worms, long since dead.  And a day came when, at the side of the entrance, the same blows were heard again. . . .  And this time it was the robbers.  Carrying torches in their hands, they rushed headlong in, with shouts and cries and, except in the safe hiding-place of the nine coffins, everything was plundered, the bandages torn off, the golden trinkets snatched from the necks of the mummies.  Then, when they had sorted their booty, they walled up the entrance as before, and went their way, leaving an inextricable confusion of shrouds, of human bodies, of entrails issuing from shattered vases, of broken gods and emblems.

Afterwards, for long centuries, there was silence again, and finally, in our days, the double, then in its last weakness and almost non-existent, perceived the same noise of stones being unsealed by blows of pickaxes.  The third time, the living men who entered were of a race never seen before.  At first they seemed respectful and pious, only touching things gently.  But they came to plunder everything, even the nine coffins in their still inviolate hiding-place.  They gathered the smallest fragments with a solicitude almost religious.  That they might lose nothing they even sifted the rubbish and the dust.  But, as for Amenophis, who was already nothing more than a lamentable mummy, without jewels or bandages, they left him at the bottom of his sarcophagus of sandstone.  And since that day, doomed to receive each morning numerous people of a strange aspect, he dwells alone in his hypogeum, where there is now neither a being nor a thing belonging to his time.

But yes, there is!  We had not looked all round.  There in one of the lateral chambers some bodies are lying, dead bodies—­three corpses (unswathed at the time of the pillage), side by side on their rags.  First, a woman, the queen probably, with loosened hair.  Her profile has preserved its exquisite lines.  How beautiful she still is!  And then a young boy with the little greyish face of a doll.  His head is shaved, except for that long curl at the right side, which denotes a prince of the royal blood.  And the third a man.  Ugh!  How terrible he is—­looking as if he found death a thing irresistibly comical.  He even writhes with laughter, and eats a corner of his shroud as if to prevent himself from bursting into a too unseemly mirth.

And then, suddenly, black night!  And we stand as if congealed in our place.  The electric light has gone out—­everywhere at once.  Above, on the earth, midday must have sounded—­for those who still have cognisance of the sun and the hours.