Satisfied that the place was absolutely fresh and untouched, the writer crawled out, and the others, one by by one, crawled in. When each had seen it in turn the opening was barricaded for the night; the sailors being forbidden to enter it lest they should injure the decorations. That evening was held a solemn council, whereat it was decided that Talhamy and Reïs Hassan should go to-morrow to the nearest village, there to engage the services of fifty able-bodied natives. With such help, we calculated that the place might easily be cleared in two days. If it was a tomb we hoped to discover the entrance to the mummy pit below; if but a small chapel, or speos, like those at Ibrim, we should at least have the satisfaction of seeing all that it contained in the way of sculptures and inscriptions. This was accordingly done; but we worked again next morning just the same, till midday. Our native contingent, numbering about forty men, then made their appearance in a rickety old boat, the bottom of which was half-full of water. They had been told to bring implements; and they did bring such as they had--two broken oars to dig with, some baskets, and a number of little slips of planking which, being tied between two pieces of rope and drawn along the surface, acted as scrapers and were useful as far as they went. Squatting in double file from the entrance of the speos to the edge of the cliff, and to the burden of a rude chant propelling these improvised scrapers, the men began by clearing a path to the doorway. This gave them work enough for the afternoon. At sunset, when they dispersed, the path was scooped out to a depth of four feet, like a miniature railway cutting between embankments of sand. Next morning came the sheik in person with his two sons and a following of a hundred men. This was so many more than we had bargained for that we at once foresaw a scheme to extort money. The sheik, however, proved to be that same Rashwan Ebn Hassan el Kashef, by whom the happy couple had been so hospitably entertained about a fortnight before; we therefore received him with honor, invited him to luncheon, and, hoping to get the work done quickly, set the men on in gangs under the superintendence of Reïs Hassan and the head sailor. By noon the door was cleared down to the threshold, and the whole south and west walls were laid bare to the floor. We now found that the débris which blocked the north wall and the center of the floor was not, as we had at first supposed, a pile of fallen fragments, but one solid bowlder which had come down bodily from above. To remove this was impossible. We had no tools to cut or break it and it was both wider and higher than the doorway. Even to clear away the sand which rose behind it to the ceiling would have taken a long time and have caused inevitable injury to the paintings around. Already the brilliancy of the color was marred where the men had leaned their backs, all wet with perspiration, against the walls.