And now, having dismounted through compassion for our unfortunate little donkeys, the first thing we observe is the curious mixture of débris underfoot. At Ghîzeh one treads only sand and pebbles; but here at Sakkârah the whole plateau is thickly strewn with scraps of broken pottery, limestone, marble, and alabaster; flakes of green and blue glaze; bleached bones; shreads of yellow linen, and lumps of some odd-looking, dark-brown substance, like dried-up sponge. Presently some one picks up a little noseless head of one of the common blue-ware funereal statuettes, and immediately we all fall to work, grubbing for treasure--a pure waste of precious time; for, though the sand is full of débris, it has been sifted so often and so carefully by the Arabs that it no longer contains anything worth looking for. Meanwhile, one finds a fragment of iridescent glass--another, a morsel of shattered vase--a third, an opaque bead of some kind of yellow paste. And then, with a shock which the present writer, at all events, will not soon forget, we suddenly discover that these scattered bones are human--that those linen shreds are shreds of cerement cloths--that yonder odd-looking brown lumps are rent fragments of what once was living flesh! And now for the first time we realize that every inch of this ground on which we are standing, and all these hillocks and hollows and pits in the sand, are violated graves. “Ce n’est que le premier pas que coûte.” We soon became quite hardened to such sights and learned to rummage among dusty sepulchers with no more compunction than would have befitted a gang of professional body-snatchers. These are experiences upon which one looks back afterward with wonder and something like remorse; but so infectious is the universal callousness, and so over-mastering is the passion for relic-hunting, that I do not doubt we should again do the same things under the same circumstances. Most Egyptian travelers, if questioned, would have to make a similar confession. Shocked at first, they denounce with horror the whole system of sepulchral excavation, legal as well as predatory; acquiring, however, a taste for scarabs and funerary statuettes, they soon begin to buy with eagerness the spoils of the dead; finally, they forget all their former scruples and ask no better fortune than to discover and confiscate a tomb for themselves.