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as a doorkeeper—kept armed watch over the find, amid as 
fanatical and frantically angry a set of ruffians and body- 
snatchers as ever Thebes or Luxor had produced. 
It must have been a stirring sight as Brugsch Bey stood at the 
shaft mouth and watched the squads carrying their royal burdens 
over that vast Theban plain. He thus described it to Mr. 
Wilson :— 
‘«‘T shall never forget the scenes I witnessed when standing 
at the mouth of the Deir el Bahari shaft, I watched the strange 
line of helpers while they carried across that historical plain the 
bodies of the very kings who had constructed the temples still 
standing, aud of the very priests who had officiated in them.”’ 
The steamer came at last and the mummies were packed 
aboard, and down the Nile with the curses of Luxor upon their 
heads, went the party with their convoy of ancient kings. The 
delay of those three days at Luxor was fatal to their peace. The 
news that Pharaoh was coming down the Nile had got on ahead, 
and Brugsch Bey told me that one of the most striking things in 
the whole journey, to his mind, was the way in which there 
arose from all the land of Egypt an exceeding bitter cry ; women 
wailing and tearing their hair, men casting dust into the air, 
came crowding from the villages to the banks to make 
lamentation for Pharaoh ; and as in the days more than 8,000 
years ago, with wailing and great weeping, the funeral barge had 
carried the dead kings up Nile and over the sacred Luxor to 
their rest among the Theban hills; so to-day, with wailing and 
weeping and gnashing of teeth, and tearing of hair and all the 
signs of a national lamentation, did the bodies of the mighty 
Pharaohs sail swiftly down through a land of mourning and 
sorrow, from their long repose in the Theban valley of the dead, 
to their final (?) rest at Cairo beside the slimy Nile. 
In The Academy, of July 3, 1886, a very startling and accurate 
account is given of the unwrapping of the mummies of Rameses 
II., the great Sesostris of the Greeks, and Rameses III., which 
took place at the Balak Museum, on June 1, 1886, in the 
presence of the Khedive, Moukhtar Pasha Ghazi, Sir Drummond 
Wolff, and others. All the details of this scene the lecturer 
gave, describing the different layers of wrappings that enveloped 
the body, the paintings on fine linen, and the amulet of the 
goddess Nouit, and then the appearance from beneath its many 
cerements of the great Sesostris himself; he then proceeded :— 
In the Salle des Momies, in the Bulak Museum, I saw 
the great king encircled by his predecessors and successors. 
Aahmes I, the founder of the xviii. dynasty s.c. 1700, the 
restorer of the rightful line of Pharaohs after the expulsion of the 
