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be endless, as it seemed to them in their impatience to explore. 
A palm tree was thrown across the well’s mouth, a pulley and 
tackle rigged up, and swiftly went forward the work under the 
burning sun. At length the bottom, 40 feet down, was reached ; 
all the while Brugsch Bey and Achmed Kemal were certainly in 
danger, for the fanatical robbers round them knew that Brugsch 
Bey was in reality going to be theirruin. But his rifle was at 
his shoulder, and so the work went on. At the bottom of the 
shaft they found an opening running westward about 24 feet into 
the rock ; on the right and left hands of the wall were various 
hieratic inscriptions, possibly put there by the priests, the last 
date of their visit to see if Pharaoh was right. At the end of 
the 24 feet the passage turned sharply to the right, and went 
northward. The hearts of the explorers beat fast ; when they lit 
their torches they found a royal funeral canopy in a heap on the 
ground, used, perhaps, last when the coffin of one of the kings 
was floated down to Thebes for burial 1,400 years before Christ. 
Trinkets, alabaster boxes, bits of papyrus, mummy cloth, and 
broken coffins strewed the way, and a cluster of coffins nearly 
blocked it. The explorers were fairly staggered. 
Boxes were seen piled by the walls, filled as they afterwards 
found, with statuettes of Osiris, blue enamelled drinking cups 
for the dead and vases. On pushed Brugsch Bey, and at about 
130 feet from the well shaft, he stood at the entrance of a great 
mortuary chamber 18ft. by 23ft. in floor space, and about 6ft. 
high. The torch showed that the whole room was packed roof 
high with royal coffins, and one can well understand that as the 
torch filled the dark with the reflection of the elaborate paintings 
on the coffin lids of the illustrious dead, Brugsch Bey felt so 
dazed that he went straight out of the tomb into the open air of 
the dying day. with the sort of feeling that on him hung a secret 
which, unless he lived till to-morrow’s sun, might perish and 
leave the whole world the poorer. He feared to faint lest the 
secret should be unrevealed. 
There was a find of forty royal mummies at once ; the chamber 
was the mortuary chamber of the priest-king dynasty who reigned 
over Thebes and Tanis between 1,100 and 1,000 8.c. The bodies 
had been buried with all the appendages of funeral repast and 
sepulchral toilet. I saw in the Bilak Museum the wigs in the 
wig-boxes, curled and frizzled, which one queen hoped to wear 
at the resurrection morn. Legs or shoulders of mutton, and 
chickens for the food of the soul in the next world, offerings 
of fruit, lotus flowers and garlands of acacia, cups of blue 
enamel, and glass ointment bottles were all found in the 
cavern chamber up in the lonely Libyan hill. But the find 
in the chamber was not as interesting as the find in the 
