71 
kings be till the resurrection. The Nile might overflow, 
but here in the valley of dry bones in the Libyan lime- 
stone range, should these royal bodies lie in arid safety. War 
might flame at the hundred gates of the royal city, and other 
conquerors break the peace oi Thebes, but they should not 
disturb the rest of the Pharaohs. Even if they burnt to 
the ground the memorial temples of Hatasu and Medinet 
Aboo, or shattered the Hypostyle Hall of the Rameseum, these 
conquerors should never trouble the secret halls of the dead 
high up in this burning Wady of Biban el Malouk, as it is 
called to-day. There undisturbed, the bodies wrapped in their 
thousand wrappings, enclosed in their double coffins, should sleep 
on, and the priests alone should know the secrets of their abode 
in their slumber of eternity. 
It is true that these cavern chambers in the valley of the kings 
were carefully hewn. Kings of the xvii. and xix. dynasties would 
at least see personally to this. Far away in the burning amphi- 
theatre of royal sleep they would all have their tomb cavern cut. 
From Amenophis III. to the end of the twentieth dynasty, only 
the tomb of King Horus is missing. 
Before they died, the kings doubtless went up to the plateau 
of Deir el Bahari and entered the vale of Biban el Malouk, and 
watched the sculptors and decorators at work. Not hewing a 
couple of rooms into a closed chamber for the statue of the 
deceased, as the old kings of the v. and xiii. dynasties did; 
not covering the ceilings with the stars of heaven and the walls 
with pictures of the every-day life of a great sporting farmer, 
as seen in the tomb of Tih, at Sakkara, or on the walls of 
Beni Hassan; no, but rather hewing a long tunnel into the 
solid rock with angles and stairings and crooked passages, upon 
whose walls should be painted the passage of the soul 
through its purgatorial cleansings to the hall of blessedness, 
upon whose doorways and portals would be depicted the adders 
spitting poison and flame, the guardians of the doors of Heaven. 
All these passages, with their pictures of the soul passing through 
torment to rest, ended in a single mortuary chamber far in the 
hollow womb of the limestone mountain. When the soul should 
be restored purified, it should enter the barque of the Sun, as the 
wall pictures would tell us; and there waiting for its resurrection 
at the end of the 3,000 years the body of the Pharaoh should lie 
free from harm of man or the unimaginable touch of Time. 
But how came it about that so many of these tomb-dwellings, 
though so carefully secluded, when discovered from time to time 
were found generally empty. Egyptologists were puzzled. The 
bodies of the kings had been and were not. It was a mystery, 
and Thebes for a long time distinctly refused to part with its 
secret. 
