126 Madden 1 s Travels in Turkey, fyc. 



at a Christian's head rather than satisfy his craving stomach. He 

 concealed it for near a quarter of an hour, till I was opposite his 

 window, he then thrust his naked arm through the bars, and threw 

 it in my face. In spite of my entreating, he got the courbash round 

 his uncovered shoulders." 



While travelling in Upper Egypt, the subject of embalming 

 naturally came under the author's notice. He was a diligent 

 investigator of the tombs with which that district abounds ; 

 and the following are a few among the interesting observations 

 which his researches led to. The tombs are met with in the 

 Libyan mountain, on the north-west side of Thebes. They 

 perforate the mountain from top to bottom. The lowest are the 

 most highly finished. These are inhabited by the Arabs, about 

 three hundred of whom pass a miserable existence in these sepul- 

 chres of pride. The staple commodity of the place (Gourna) 

 consists in mummies, the Arabs finding it easier to live by sell- 

 ing dead men than by the toil of husbandry. In the traffic 

 of mummies, however, there appears to be no little portion of 

 fraud ; for the author states it as his firm belief, that in all the 

 cabinets of Europe, there are not probably twenty mummies 

 in the same coffin in which they were originally deposited. 

 Having had the good fortune to cure one of the old troglodytes 

 of a bad fever, he gained admission, with great difficulty, to 

 the interior of the principal tomb, and there he found the 

 manufacture of mummies going forward : that is to say, the 

 best mummy cases being laid open, the original was taken out 

 and sold, and its place supplied by one of an inferior kind. 

 A little red paint in a coffee cup set all matters to rights again. 

 From this he proceeded through a narrow passage into another 

 cave, which was literally crammed with mummies. They 

 were lying in horizontal layers, as they had, in all probability, 

 been deposited some thousand years ago. In all the sepul- 

 chres which the author visited, he never found one mummy 

 placed upright. Yet Herodotus so describes them. He pur- 

 chased three mummies from his old friend, all in excellent 

 preservation, for about sixteen shillings, the regular cost price 

 for such articles from the Frank agents being from ten to 

 fifteen pounds. They illustrated the three modes of embalm- 

 ing common among the Egyptians. The first consisted simply 

 of drying. This could not have been practised generally in 

 any other country than Upper Egypt, where the dryness of 

 the air is so extraordinary. In Lower Egypt the mummies go 

 to pieces on exposure to the external air; and at Alexandria, 

 where the atmosphere is very humid, mummies, which had 

 resisted corruption in a dry air for perhaps forty centuries, 



