A still more horrible figure of nightmare was that of the unnamed person whose contorted limbs and writhen countenance suggested to Maspero the most ghastly of all suspicions as to how he met his end. “It makes one’s flesh creep to look at it,” says Maspero, speaking of this mummy; “the hands and feet are tied by strong bands, and are curled up as if under an intolerable pain; the abdomen is drawn up, the stomach projects like a ball, the chest is contracted, the head is thrown back, the face is contorted in a hideous grimace, the retracted lips expose the teeth, and the mouth is open as if to give utterance to a last despairing cry. The conviction is borne in upon us that the man was invested while still alive with the wrappings of the dead.” Others have suggested a less horrible interpretation of the condition of the figure. In the report of the trial which took place in the reign of Ramses III of individuals accused of a conspiracy against the life of the king it is significantly said of some of those whose guilt was established, “They died of themselves,” and the suggestion has been made that this figure, whose contortions might well be due to the action of an irritant poison, is that of one of these involuntary suicides. In either case, the thing is sufficiently horrible, and hints, not obscurely, at that darker aspect of Oriental Court life which lay beneath all the glitter and splendour of the Theban palace. The find of Der el-Bahri was followed, in 1894–5, by the discoveries of M. de Morgan at Dahshur, which have given us the exquisite jewellery of the XIIth and XIIIth Dynasty already alluded to in our chapter on the Pyramids. And then, in 1898, M. Loret discovered in the Valley of the Kings the tomb of Amenhotep II, son of the great conqueror Thothmes III.