proving that this want of precaution was sometimes disastrous. In the course of so many centuries, during which the Hyksos, the Ethiopians, the Assyrians, and the Persians overran the country by turns, such statues as were not sheltered in some well dissembled retreat must more than once have been struck off their pedestals and broken, or, like those of the unlucky Chephren, thrown head-foremost into the depths of the earth. [Illustration: FIG. 127.--Plans of the temples belonging to the second and third pyramids; from Perring.] As such vast importance was attached to the preservation of the portrait statues upon which the prolongation of life after death was made so largely to depend, is it not probable that the idea of hiding some of them in the innermost recesses of the pyramids themselves may have occurred to those who caused those monuments to be built? It is obvious that no hiding-place could be more secure. No such retreats have yet been discovered in any of the galleries which have been explored by modern curiosity, but it does not follow that they do not exist in some corner which has not yet been reached, which will perhaps never be reached by the most persevering explorer. Quite lately M. Maspero believed that he recognized a serdab in a subterranean chamber with three niches which he found near the mummy chamber in the Pyramid of Ounas, the last king of the fifth dynasty.[182] Before we could say that such an arrangement does not exist elsewhere, we should have to take some pyramid to pieces from the first stone to the last. It might, however, be asserted that the images of the deceased would, if hidden in the pyramid, be too far removed from that public hall to which his relations brought their offerings and their pious homage. At such a distance they would not have heard the friendly voices or the magic chants; nor would the scent of the incense have reached their nostrils. In a word, they would have been ill placed for the fulfilment of the office assigned to them by the Egyptian faith. [182] This pyramid was opened on February 28, 1881. Circumstantial accounts of the discoveries to which it led have not yet been published. The _Moniteur Égyptien_ of March 15, 1881, contains a short account of the opening. [Since this note was written, a full account of the entrance and exploration of this pyramid, together with the texts discovered, has been published by M. MASPERO in the _Recueil de Travaux_, vol. iii. liv. 3 and 4, 1882.--ED.]