besides children. Thus it is done here; and how they celebrate the
festival in honour of Isis at the city of Busiris has been told by
me before: for, as I said, they beat themselves in mourning after the
sacrifice, all of them both men and women, very many myriads of people;
but for whom they beat themselves it is not permitted to me by religion
to say: and so many as there are of the Carians dwelling in Egypt do
this even more than the Egyptians themselves, inasmuch as they cut their
foreheads also with knives; and by this it is manifested that they are
strangers and not Egyptians. At the times when they gather together
at the city of Sais for their sacrifices, on a certain night they all
kindle lamps many in number in the open air round about the houses; now
the lamps are saucers full of salt and oil mixed, and the wick floats by
itself on the surface, and this burns during the whole night; and to
the festival is given the name _Lychnocaia_ (the lighting of lamps).
Moreover those of the Egyptians who have not come to this solemn
assembly observe the night of the festival and themselves also light
lamps all of them, and thus not in Sais alone are they lighted, but over
all Egypt: and as to the reason why light and honour are allotted to
this night, about this there is a sacred story told. To Heliopolis and
Buto they go year by year and do sacrifice only: but at Papremis they
do sacrifice and worship as elsewhere, and besides that, when the sun
begins to go down while some few of the priests are occupied with the
image of the god, the greater number of them stand in the entrance of
the temple with wooden clubs, and other persons to the number of more
than a thousand men with purpose to perform a vow, these also having
all of them staves of wood, stand in a body opposite to those: and the
image, which is in a small shrine of wood covered over with gold, they
take out on the day before to another sacred building. The few then
who have been left about the image, draw a wain with four wheels, which
bears the shrine and the image that is within the shrine, and the other