Edwards, Amelia B.: A thousand miles up the Nile (New York, [1888])

94 A THOUSAND MILES UP THE NILE.

larger scale; differing only in respect of its inhabitants,
who, instead of being sullen, thievish and unfriendly, are
too familiar to be pleasant, and the most unappeasable
beggars out of Ireland. So our mirage turns to sordid
reality, and Siut, which from afar oil looked like the capi-
tal of Dreamland, resolves itself into a big mud town, as
ugly and ordinary as its fellows. Even the minarets, so
elegant from a distance, betray for the most part but
rough masonry and clumsy ornamentation when closely
looked into.

A lofty embanked road planted with fine sycamore figs
leads from llamra to Siut; and another embanked road
leads from Siut to the mountain of tombs. Of the ancient
.Egyptian city no vestige remains, the modern town being
built upon the mounds of the earlier settlement; but the
City of the Dead—so much of it, at least, as was excavated
in the living rock—survives, as at Memphis, to commem-
orate the departed splendor of the place.

"We took donkeys next day to the edge of the desert and
went up to the sepulchers on foot. The mountain, which
looked a delicate salmon-pink when seen from afar, now
showed bleached aud arid and streaked with ocherous yel-
low. Layer above layer, in beds of strongly marked strati-
fication, it towered overhead; tier above tier, the tombs
yawned, open-mouthed, along the face of the precipice. I
picked up a fragment of the rock, and found it light, por-
ous and full of little cells, like pumice. The slopes were
strewn with stones, as well as with fragments of mummy,
shreds of mummy-cloth and human bones, all whitening
and withering in the sun.

The first tomb we came to was the so-called Stabl Antar
—a magnificentbutcrnelly mutilated excavation, consisting
of a grand entrance, a vaulted corridor, a great hall, two
side chambers and a sanctuary. The ceiling of the cor-
ridor, now smoke-blackened and defaced, has been richly
decorated with intricate patterns in light green, white and
buff, upon a ground of dark bluish-green stucco. The wall
to the right on entering is covered with a long hieroglyphic
inscription. In the sanctuary vague traces of seated fig-
ures, male and female, with lotus blossoms in their hands,
are dimly visible. Two colossal warriors incised in out-
line upon the leveled rock—the one very perfect, the other
hacked almost out of recognition—stand on each side of