Hard by are ranked according to dynasty, and in chronological order, the
proud Pharaohs in a piteous row: father, son, grandson, great-grandson.
And common paper tickets tell their tremendous names, Seti I., Ramses
II., Seti II., Ramses III., Ramses IV. . . . Soon the muster will be
complete, with such energy have men dug in the heart of the rocks
to find them all; and these glass cases will no doubt be their final
resting-place. In olden days, however, they made many pilgrimages after
their death, for in the troubled times of the history of Egypt it was
one of the harassing preoccupations of the reigning sovereign to hide,
to hide at all costs, the mummies of his ancestors, which filled the
earth increasingly, and which the violators of tombs were so swift to
track. Then they were carried clandestinely from one grave to another,
raised each from his own pompous sepulchre, to be buried at last
together in some humble and less conspicuous vault. But it is here, in
this museum of Egyptian antiquities, that they are about to accomplish
their return to dust, which has been deferred, as if by miracle, for
so many centuries. Now, stripped of their bandages, their days are
numbered, and it behoves us to hasten to draw these physiognomies of
three or four thousand years ago, which are about to perish.

In that coffin--the last but one of the row on the left--it is the great
Sesostris himself who awaits us. We know of old that face of ninety
years, with its nose hooked like the beak of a falcon; and the gaps
between those old man's teeth; the meagre, birdlike neck, and the hand
raised in a gesture of menace. Twenty years have elapsed since he was
brought back to the light, this master of the world. He was wrapped
_thousands of times_ in a marvellous winding-sheet, woven of aloe
fibres, finer than the muslin of India, which must have taken years in
the making and measured more than 400 yards in length. The unswathing,
done in the presence of the Khedive Tewfik and the great personages of