[263] PASSALACQUA describes a tomb of this kind in detail in his _Catalogue raisonné et historique des Antiquités découvertes en Égypte_ (8vo., 1826). This tomb had been visited and pillaged at some unknown epoch. One of the two chambers had been opened and stripped, but the second, which opened lower down the well, and on the other side, escaped the notice of the violators (pp. 118-120). In the tomb opened by RHIND (_Thebes_, _its Tombs_, etc. pl. 5, v.), the well gave access to four chambers of different sizes arranged round it like the arms of a cross. [264] _Description de l'Égypte_, (_Antiquités_,) plates, vol. ii. p. 78. [265] RHIND describes one of the most curious of these substitutions in his chapter IV. In that case an usurper of the time of Ptolemy established himself and all his family in the mummy chambers at the foot of the well, after relegating the statues and mummies of the rightful owner and his people to the room above. The well and mummy chamber in the rock are, then, found almost universally, but the form of the rest of the tomb varies according to its date and site. Those in the plain are arranged differently to those in the hill sides. But it must be understood that when we speak of the plain in connection with the Theban tombs, we do not mean the space over which spread the waters of the Nile. We mean the gentle sandy slopes which lie between the foot of the cliffs and the cultivated fields, a narrow band which widens a little between the long spurs which the mountains throw out towards the river. In these land-gulfs the rock crops up here and there, and nowhere is it covered by more than a thin layer of sand. Such a soil, being above the reach of the annual inundation, was marvellously well-fitted both for the construction of the tomb and for the preservation of the mummy. [Illustration: FIGS. 187, 188.--Theban tombs from the bas-reliefs. (From Wilkinson, ch. xvi.)]