After a short but toilsome walk and some delay outside a prison-like door at the bottom of a steep descent, we were admitted by the guardian--a gaunt old Arab with a lantern in his hand. It was not an inviting looking place within. The outer daylight fell upon a rough step or two, beyond which all was dark. We went in. A hot, heavy atmosphere met us on the threshold; the door fell to with a dull clang, the echoes of which went wandering away as if into the central recesses of the earth; the Arab chattered and gesticulated. He was telling us that we were now in the great vestibule and that it measured ever so many feet in this and that direction; but we could see nothing--neither the vaulted roof overhead, nor the walls on any side, nor even the ground beneath our feet. It was like the darkness of infinite space. A lighted candle was then given to each person and the Arab led the way. He went dreadfully fast and it seemed at every step as if one were on the brink of some frightful chasm. Gradually, however, our eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and we found that we had passed out of the vestibule into the first great corridor. All was vague, mysterious, shadowy. A dim perspective loomed out of the darkness. The lights twinkled and flitted like wandering sparks of stars. The Arab held his lantern to the walls here and there, and showed us some votive tablets inscribed with records of pious visits paid by devout Egyptians to the sacred tombs. Of these they found five hundred when the catacombs were first opened; but Mariette sent nearly all to the Louvre. A few steps farther and we came to the tombs--a succession of great vaulted chambers hewn out at irregular distances along both sides of the central corridor and sunk some six or eight feet below the surface. In the middle of each chamber stood an enormous sarcophagus of polished granite. The Arab, flitting on ahead like a black ghost, paused a moment before each cavernous opening, flashed the light of his lantern on the sarcophagus and sped away again, leaving us to follow as we could. So we went on, going every moment deeper into the solid rock and farther from the open air and the sunshine. Thinking it would be cold underground, we had brought warm wraps in plenty; but the heat, on the contrary, was intense, and the atmosphere stifling. We had not calculated on the dryness of the place, nor had we remembered that ordinary mines and tunnels are cold because they are damp. But here for incalculable ages--for thousands of years probably before the Nile had even cut its path through the rocks of Silsilis--a cloudless African sun had been pouring its daily floods of light and heat upon the dewless desert overhead. The place might well be unendurable. It was like a great oven stored with the slowly accumulated heat of cycles so remote and so many, that the earliest periods of Egyptian history seem, when compared with them, to belong to yesterday.