70 
HOW I SAW PHARAOH IN THE FLESH. 
By the Rev. H. D. RAWNSLEY, M.A., Vicar of Crosthwaite, 
Keswick. October 12th, 1889. 
The lecturer, having referred briefly to the visit he paid to the 
Museum at Cairo, proceeded to give his account of the discovery 
of the Mummies of the Pharaohs thus :-— 
The story of the Find was briefly this :— 
For a long time past, tourists who returned from Thebes to 
Cairo brought with them scarabs, bits of papyrus, sometimes 
jewellery, cartonage, and the like, which so evidently be- 
longed to the xviii. or xix. dynasties, Rameses I., Seti IL., and 
Rameses II. the great Rameses of the Bondage, that Monsieur 
Maspero and Brugsch Bey suspected there had been a great 
mummy-find somewhere in the Royal burial place, the ‘l'ombs of 
the Kings. You will ask what is meant by the Tombs of the 
Kings ; briefly this: at the western side of the great Theban 
plain rises up a vast mass of limestone rock broken into 
terraces. High up and underneath one of the terraces is the 
Temple of Deir el Bahari. That was the temple ante-chamber 
to the tomb; it was close to that that the great Royal mummy 
find was made. 
However much the Theban kings might build memorial 
temples in the Theban plain, it is always to be remembered 
that these great kings took good care not to entrust their bodies 
to these shrines. After the lapse of 3,000 years the dead were 
again to reappear upon the earth and resume their bodies ; these 
bodies, then, must not only be embalmed, but must also be most 
carefully guaranteed from harm. Therefore, in some out of the 
way place, if possible, must the tombs be. 
Now it chanced that the huge limestone cliff of many terraces 
upon the western side of the Theban plain, enclosed two desolate 
valleys. One of these opened into the plain, and in pits and 
caves, carefully hewn and protected by clever devices of block 
fitting and angular shafts, the princes and priests of old Thebes 
should lie in quiet, resting in the heart of hills where none 
but a jackal would roam, in a valley where the sun beats 
mercilessly, where there is no shade except what the chameleon 
casts, where is no vegetation, and one realises at the noon 
what the breath of a furnace is. In this hidden amphi- 
theatre of silence and death should the bodies of the Theban 
