the train of earthly power and grandeur. They deliberately turned their
backs on the worn-out and discredited imperial trappings of the Thothmes
and Ramses, and they took the supposed primitive simplicity of the
Snefrus, the Khufus, and the Ne-user-Râs for a model and ensampler to
their lives. It was an age of conscious and intended archaism, and in
pursuit of the archaistic ideal the Mem-phites of the Saïte age had
themselves buried in the ancient necropolis of Sakkâra, side by side
with their ancestors of the time of the Vth and VIth Dynasties. Several
of these tombs have lately been discovered and opened, and fitted with
modern improvements. One or two of them, of the Persian period, have
wells (leading to the sepulchral chamber) of enormous depth, down which
the modern tourist is enabled to descend by a spiral iron staircase. The
Serapeum itself is lit with electricity, and in the Tombs of the Kings
at Thebes nothing disturbs the silence but the steady thumping pulsation
of the dynamo-engine which lights the ancient sepulchres of the
Pharaohs. Thus do modern ideas and inventions help us to see and so to
understand better the works of ancient Egypt. But it is perhaps a little
too much like the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. The interiors of
the later tombs are often decorated with reliefs which imitate those of
the early period, but with a kind of delicate grace which at once marks
them for what they are, so that it is impossible to confound them with
the genuine ancient originals from which they were adapted.

Riding from Sakkâra southwards to Dashûr, we pass on the way the
gigantic stone mastaba known as the _Mastabat el-Fara'ûn_, "Pharaoh's
Bench." This was considered to be the tomb of the Vth Dynasty king,
Unas, until his pyramid was found by Prof. Maspero at Sakkâra. From its
form it might be thought to belong to a monarch of the Hid Dynasty, but
the great size of the stone blocks of which it is built seems to point
rather to the XIIth. All attempts to penetrate its secret by actual