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

376 A- THOUSAND MILKS UP THE MILE.

still so deeply interested in the patterns of one another's
ear-rings? It seems to me that the world has been stand-
ing still in here for these last five-and-thirty years.

Did I say five-and-thirty? Ah, me! I think we must
multiply it by ten, and then by ten again, ere we come to
the right figure. These people lived in the time of the
Thothmes and the Amenhoteps—a time upon which Rame-
ses the Great looked back as we look back to the days of
the Tudors and the Stuarts.

From the tombs above we went back to the excavations
below. The bricked-up opening had led, as the diggers
expected, into a second vault ; and another mummy-case,
half-crushed by a fall of debris, had just been taken out.
A third was found later in the afternoon. Curiously
enough, they were all three mummies of women.

The governor was taking his luncheon with the first
mummy in the recesses of the stable, which had been a
fine tomb once, but reeked now with manure. lie sat on
a rug, cross-legged, with a bowl of sour milk before him
and a tray of most uninviting little cakes. He invited me
to a seat on his rug, handed me his own spoon, and did
the honors of the stable as pleasantly as if it had been a
palace.

I asked him why the excavators, instead of working
among these second-class graves, were not set to search for
the tombs of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, supposed
to be waiting discovery in a certain valley called the Valley
of the West. He shook his head. The way to the Valley
of the West, he said, was long and difficult. Men working
there must encamp upon the spot; and merely to supply
them with water would be no easy matter. Ho was allowed,
in fact, only a sum sufficient for the wages of fifty excava-
tors ; and to attack the Valley of the West with less than
two hundred would be useless.

We had luncheon that morning, I remember, with the
M. IS.'s in the second hall of the Eamosseum. It was but
one occasion among many; for the writer was constantly
at work on that side of the river, and we had luncheon in
one or other of the western temples every day. Yet that
particular meeting stands out in my memory apart from
the rest. I see the joyous party gathered together in the
shade of the great columns—the Persian rugs spread on
the uneven ground—the dragoman in his picturesque dress