These, however, were only the preliminaries of the great find which was awaiting the lucky excavator. On October 16 he started operations at a point about 15 yards from the tomb already mentioned (which would seem, therefore, to have been that of Ramses I), and in a spot which seemed to his workmen most unlikely to yield anything. On the 17th they struck the first indications of a cutting, and on the next day the entrance of a tomb was laid bare. Before the close of the day Belzoni had penetrated into the tomb as far as the antechamber to the first of its pillared halls, where his progress was interrupted for the time by a pit 30 feet deep, which had to be bridged before he could advance further. Crossing it on the next day, he gained access to the rest of the tomb, and the next three weeks he spent as a man in a dream wandering through the chambers of the great tomb, and recording to the best of his ability the wonders which he had been the first to see for nearly three thousand years. His attempts at representation of what he saw were imperfect enough, and his nomenclature of the various chambers is merely paltry. Titles like “The Drawing-room,” “The Room of Beauties,” “The Side-board Room,” seem ludicrously out of place amidst the sombre dignity of Sety’s sepulchre. Still Belzoni cannot be denied the merits of patience and perseverance, and it was no careless worker who spent a whole twelve-month in the stifling atmosphere of a tomb in the Valley of the Kings taking impressions in wax of all the figures on a tomb which measures 328 feet from end to end. Belzoni attributed the tomb to Necho and Psamtek II of the XXVIth Dynasty, finding evidence to his satisfaction of the attribution in a procession on the walls, in which he saw Persians, Jews, and Ethiopians, all of whom, according to him, “Nichao and Psammethis” had conquered. He was thus a matter of seven hundred years out in his dating of his discovery, for the tomb is that of Sety I of the XIXth Dynasty, and a monument of the art of the New Empire just at that point when it had passed its zenith, and was trembling on the verge of the decadence, though still capable of the wonders of Abydos, which are rivalled by some of the work here. Sety himself, of course, he did not find in the magnificent alabaster sarcophagus which stood in one of the pillared halls of the tomb. Luckily, when we think of how the explorer would probably have treated him, that honourable king and valiant soldier had long centuries before been removed from his splendid underground palace to the obscurer but safer hiding-place where he was discovered in our own time, and treated with a little more reverence than he would have received from Belzoni; but his sarcophagus was in itself a prize more than sufficient to reward the excavator for all the labour he had spent.