Elsewhere, so singular a form of architecture would have been looked upon as something utterly unnatural and monstrous; but in Egypt, where every species of deception, and what we should now call stage effect, was resorted to in all buildings, and particularly in such as were intended for religious purposes, it was by no means calculated to excite astonishment. Near the summit of this strange edifice, sheltered from the glare of the declining luminary by projecting awnings of muslin, the fabric of the Egyptian loom, then known as Byssus, was a long range of windows, on which the sunbeams glittered with a brilliancy which showed that they were fitted with that most precious of ancient luxuries, transparent glass. In a small but airy apartment of this mansion of the dead, there were now collected a small group of females, whose gorgeous draperies and jeweled ornaments, would have seemed to denote the proud beauties of some barbaric court, rather than mourners over the soulless tenement which had so recently inclosed the spirit of a man. Situated at the very summit of the edifice, and commanding a prospect far over the wilderness of aromatic gardens that surrounded it, even to the distant city, overlooking the wide valley of the Nile, with the ocean-like channel of its giant river glancing like a stream of molten gold to the evening sun, and the vast cones of the three great pyramids distinctly drawn against the deep-blue sky, that chamber might well have vied with the most beautiful retreats of king or kaisar—nor were its internal decorations less splendid than the scenery which its windows opened to the view. Its walls of the purest alabaster, polished till they reflected every object with the radiant exactness of metallic mirrors, its pilasters of the same rich materials, with their Corinthian capitals and bases of solid virgin gold, its tesselated pavement of a thousand dies, its couches glowing with the pictured fabrics of the Eastern loom, its curtains of gauze so delicate that they well nigh justified the hyperbole which had named them woven air, rendered it a befitting shrine for the form of beauty which seemed the presiding spirit of the place. On one of those rich couches there lay a figure of almost superhuman majesty. The eyes were closed, and the short curls parted from the noble brow; the features were not more pallid than is often seen in life; a strangely voluptuous smile still slept upon the well-defined and as yet unaltered lip, and, but for something of rigidity and constraint in the position of the limbs, it would never have been believed that the dreams of that warrior were those which know no waking.