When we have gone a long way, always tracking up the bed of the torrent, we come to a place where our donkeys turn off from the main course and make for what is evidently a forced passage cut clean through a wall of solid limestone. The place was once a mere recess in the cliffs; but on the farther side, masked by a natural barrier of rocks, there lay another valley leading to a secluded amphitheater among the mountains. The first Pharaoh who chose his place of burial among those hidden ways, must have been he who cut the pass and leveled the road by which we now travel. This cutting is Bab-el-Molûk--the gate of the king; a name which doubtless perpetuates that by which the place was known to the old Egyptians. Once through the gate, a grand mountain rises into view. Egypt is the land of strange mountains; and here is one which reproduces on a giant scale every feature of the pyramid of Ouenephes at Sakkarah. It is square; it rises stage above stage in ranges of columnar cliffs with slopes of débris between; and it terminates in a blunt four-sided peak nearly eighteen hundred feet above the level of the plain. Keeping this mountain always before us, we now follow the windings of the second valley, which is even more narrow, parched and glaring than the first. Perhaps the intense heat makes the road appear longer than it really is, but it seems to us like several miles. At length the uniformity of the way is broken. Two small ravines branch off, one to the right, one to the left, and in both, at the foot of the rocks, there are here and there to be seen square openings like cellar-doors, half-sunk below the surface, and seeming to shoot downward into the bowels of the earth. In another moment or so, our road ends suddenly in a wild, tumbled waste like tin exhausted quarry, shut in all round by impending precipices, at the base of which more rock-cut portals peep out at different points. From the moment when it first came into sight I had made certain that in that pyramidal mountain we should find the tombs of the kings--so certain, that I can scarcely believe our guide when he assures us that these cellars are the places we have come to see, and that the mountain contains not a single tomb. We alight, however, climb a steep slope, and find ourselves on the threshold of number seventeen. “Belzoni-tomb,” says our guide; and Belzoni’s tomb, as we know, is the tomb of Seti I. I am almost ashamed to remember now that we took our lunches in the shade of that solemn vestibule, and rested and made merry before going down into the great gloomy sepulcher, whose staircases and corridors plunged away into the darkness below as if they led straight to the land of Amenti.