Across the silent halls above we now proceed straight towards those of
whom I have demanded this nocturnal audience.

To-night the succession of these rooms, filled with glass cases, which
cover more than four hundred yards along the four sides of the building,
seems to be without end. After passing, in turn, the papyri, the
enamels, the vases that contain human entrails, we reach the mummies
of the sacred beasts: cats, ibises, dogs, hawks, all with their mummy
cloths and sarcophagi; and monkeys, too, that remain grotesque even
in death. Then commence the human masks, and, upright in glass-fronted
cupboards, the mummy cases in which the body, swathed in its mummy
cloths, was moulded, and which reproduced, more or less enlarged, the
figure of the deceased. Quite a lot of courtesans of the Greco-Roman
epoch, moulded in paste in this wise after death and crowned with roses,
smile at us provokingly from behind their windows. Masks of the colour
of dead flesh alternate with others of gold which gleam as the light of
our lantern plays upon them momentarily in our rapid passage. Their eyes
are always too large, the eyelids too wide open and the dilated pupils
seem to stare at us with alarm. Amongst these mummy cases and these
coffin lids fashioned in the shape of the human figure, there are some
that seem to have been made for giants; the head especially, beneath its
cumbrous head-dress, the head stuffed as it were between the hunchback
shoulders, looks enormous, out of all proportion to the body which,
towards the feet, narrows like a scabbard.

Although our little lantern maintains its light we seem to see here
less and less: the darkness around us in these vast rooms becomes almost
overpowering--and these are the rooms, too, that, leading one into the
other, facilitate the midnight promenade of those dread "forms" which,
every evening, are released and roam about. . . .