Looking at the valley from the Nile one would not suppose it to be anything other than a desert ravine, so I did not at first realize that it was a cemetery. There are neither gravestones nor monuments, for the kings obliterated every sign that might indicate their burial places. They dug out great chambers under the bed of this dried-up river and built cisterns for their proper drainage, but when they had finished they did all they could to make the spot look as it was in nature. For this reason their tombs remained for ages untouched and unknown. From time to time, however, one or another was discovered. Strabo, the Greek geographer, who was alive when Christ was born, speaks of forty of them as being worthy of a visit, and others are mentioned by subsequent writers. Later they were again lost, and not until in our generation when some Arabs began to sell curious antiquities was it learned that the tombs had been rediscovered and were being rifled by these vandals. The archæologists then went to work on their explorations which resulted in the opening up of tomb after tomb, until we now have what might almost be called a subterranean city of the dead in the heart of the desert. The tombs are nothing like our burial vaults. They are large rooms cut out of the solid rock, with walls straight and smooth. They are reached by many steps, going down inclined planes until they bring one far below the surface of the valley and deep under the mountains. Each king had his own tomb, which he decorated with sketches and paintings representing the life of his time and the achievements of his reign. The ceilings are beautiful. From some of them the figures of gods and goddesses look down upon us. Others are decorated with geometric designs in beautiful colours. In some, men and women are carved in bas-relief out of the solid rock and then coloured. Many of the scenes are religious, so that from them the Egyptologist is able to learn what the people of that day believed. The carvings show, too, how they lived when our remotest ancestors were savages in the wilds of Europe and Asia. The Americans have had remarkably good luck in their finds. One of them was the tomb of the parents of Queen Tiy in which all the objects were in as good condition as if they had been in a house just closed for the summer. There were armchairs beautifully carved and decorated with gold. The cushion on one of them was stuffed with down and covered with linen perfectly preserved. In another part of the chamber were two beds decorated with gold, while a light chariot stood in a corner. But most wonderful of all was the discovery in this tomb of a jar of honey, still liquid and still fragrant after thirty-three hundred years.