workmen for the night. They had cleared out a good deal of fallen stone from the corridor and when he went into the main entrance he found the air electric with suppressed excitement. One of the men clearing away rubbish had noticed that the chips of stone trickled away from his hoe into a crack in the rock. He and the head-man of his gang scraped away more of the chips with their hands and still more went sliding down into darkness. They had just decided that there must be some large opening behind the crack when Mr. Burton came along and struck a match to light up the darkness in the fissure.
"A scribbled note which he sent down to the house found the other members of the expedition just coming in from the day's work elsewhere and we all went up to the cliffs, skeptically, it must be confessed, but bringing the electric torches which Burton had written for. The sun had set and as we filed into the gloomy corridor our skepticism seemed confirmed. There was nothing for us to see but a ragged hole in the rock between the floor and one side of the passage, but when one by one we lay flat on the ground and shot a beam of light into that crack one of the most startling sights it is ever a digger's luck to see flashed before us.
"At first we hardly realized what we were looking into. It was getting late. We were so surprised; excitement was so quick to spread among us that the exact nature of the place was hard to judge. This much, however, was certain. We had found a small, totally untouched chamber crammed with myriads of little brightly painted statuettes of men and animals and models of boats. Some of us thought that we had seen coffins under them such as had been found at Beni Hassan, and we pictured ourselves rather dolefully spending the next months down in that hole restringing beads in position. Still there was nothing to be done at the time, and therefore we sent to the house for cords and sealing wax and effectively sealed up the chink in the rocks and then went home to spend the evening guessing and theorizing on what we had seen and what was in store for us.
"Thursday morning we started on what turned out to be three arduous days and nights of work. We realized enough of what was before us to make ample preparations. A room was cleared out in the house to hold whatever might be movable in the chamber; drawing boards and instruments for making plans and mirrors and reflectors for illumination were collected together and sent up to the tomb, and then Mr. Burton began to take a series of photographs beginning with one of the crack in the wall as the workmen had first found it. Here it may be said that the uninterrupted success of Burton's photography, taking exposures with sunlight thrown 90 or 100 feet along the corridor from a mirror on to a silver paper reflector, was one of the most satisfactory things about those three days. The rock was in a most precarious condition and our great fear was that fresh air entering into a chamber sealed almost hermetically for 4,000 years would result in a crash of stone on the antiquities. A full record of every fact of the finding was our purpose, but no time was to be lost—and our haste was justified, for rock is falling daily from the walls and the ceiling of the tomb now.
"Among the objects found in the tomb were models of boats and of buildings with little statuettes in wood, the rowers on the boats, the workers within the buildings, a slaughter-house, a stable, a garden. All these things are in wonderful preservation, in better preservation than objects which have been exposed to the atmosphere of New York for two years. Above the tomb of Mehenkwetre there was a pile of linen sheets, carefully folded. Dr. Lythgoe assured me that the sheets were apparently as solid as those that you would buy today, and they looked as strong. The whole exhibit is of rare artistic value as well as of archæological interest."
PENNSYLVANIACHARLES DEMUTH
Daniel Galleries
