“Yea.  The people of Kor ever embalmed their dead, as did the Egyptians, but their art was greater than the art of the Egyptians, for, whereas the Egyptians disembowelled and drew the brain, the people of Kor injected fluid into the veins, and thus reached every part.  But stay, thou shalt see,” and she halted at haphazard at one of the little doorways opening out of the passage along which we were walking, and motioned to the mutes to light us in.  We entered into a small chamber similar to the one in which I had slept at our first stopping-place, only instead of one there were two stone benches or beds in it.  On the benches lay figures covered with yellow linen,[*] on which a fine and impalpable dust had gathered in the course of ages, but nothing like to the extent that one would have anticipated, for in these deep-hewn caves there is no material to turn to dust.  About the bodies on the stone shelves and floor of the tomb were many painted vases, but I saw very few ornaments or weapons in any of the vaults.

[*] All the linen that the Amahagger wore was taken from the tombs, which accounted for its yellow hue.  It was well washed, however, and properly rebleached, it acquired its former snowy whiteness, and was the softest and best linen I ever saw.—­L.  H. H.

“Uplift the cloths, oh Holly,” said Ayesha, but when I put out my hand to do so I drew it back again.  It seemed like sacrilege, and, to speak the truth, I was awed by the dread solemnity of the place, and of the presences before us.  Then, with a little laugh at my fears, she drew them herself, only to discover other and yet finer cloths lying over the forms upon the stone bench.  These also she withdrew, and then for the first for thousands upon thousands of years did living eyes look upon the face of that chilly dead.  It was a woman; she might have been thirty-five years of age, or perhaps a little less, and had certainly been beautiful.  Even now her calm clear-cut features, marked out with delicate eyebrows and long eyelashes which threw little lines of the shadow of the lamplight upon the ivory face, were wonderfully beautiful.  There, robed in white, down which her blue-black hair was streaming, she slept her last long sleep, and on her arm, its face pressed against her breast, there lay a little babe.  So sweet was the sight, although so awful, that—­I confess it without shame—­I could scarcely withhold my tears.  It took me back across the dim gulf of ages to some happy home in dead Imperial Kor, where this winsome lady girt about with beauty had lived and died, and dying taken her last-born with her to the tomb.  There they were before us, mother and babe, the white memories of a forgotten human history speaking more eloquently to the heart than could any written record of their lives.  Reverently I replaced the grave-cloths, and, with a sigh that flowers so fair should, in the purpose of the Everlasting, have only bloomed to be gathered to the grave, I turned to the body on the opposite shelf, and gently unveiled it.  It was that of a man in advanced life, with a long grizzled beard, and also robed in white, probably the husband of the lady, who, after surviving her many years, came at the last to sleep once more for good and all beside her.