guest-chamber of kings and queens, for an audience that is private
indeed.

And there, first of all, is the woman with the baby, upon whom, without
stopping, we throw the light of our lantern. A woman who died in giving
to the world a little dead prince. Since the old embalmers no one has
seen the face of this Queen Makeri. In her coffin there she is simply
a tall female figure, outlined beneath the close-bound swathings of
brown-coloured bandages. At her feet lies the fatal baby, grotesquely
shrivelled, and veiled and mysterious as the mother herself; a sort
of doll, it seems, put there to keep her eternal company in the slow
passing of endless years.

More fearsome to approach is the row of unswathed mummies that follow.
Here, in each coffin over which we bend, there is a face which stares at
us--or else closes its eyes in order that it may not see us; and meagre
shoulders and lean arms, and hands with overgrown nails that protrude
from miserable rags. And each royal mummy that our lantern lights
reserves for us a fresh surprise and the shudder of a different
fear--they resemble one another so little. Some of them seem to laugh,
showing their yellow teeth; others have an expression of infinite
sadness and suffering. Sometimes the faces are small, refined and still
beautiful despite the pinching of the nostrils; sometimes they are
excessively enlarged by putrid swelling, with the tip of the nose eaten
away. The embalmers, we know, were not sure of their means, and the
mummies were not always a success. In some cases putrefaction ensued,
and corruption and even sudden hatchings of larvae, those "companions
without ears and without eyes," which died indeed in time but only after
they had perforated all the flesh.