"When a king died, and had been properly turned into a mummy, the funeral rites were performed, and he was taken to the excavation in the rock prepared for him. When he was packed away in his stone coffin the entrance to the tomb was sealed up, and the side of the mountain broken away; all trace of the tomb or the entrance of it was destroyed; and there is a rumor that the men who performed the work were killed, in order to prevent any revelations. Doubtless the locality of the tombs was known to a good many people; but the knowledge of it would be gradually lost, especially when the country was devastated by wars, and the whole population, in some instances, swept away. Certainly the most of these tombs were unknown for a thousand years or so previous to the present century, with a few exceptions where the Arabs had accidentally hit upon them, though many of them had been plundered and again closed during the Greek and Roman period. Belzoni was guided in his search by an incident which the Arabs had told him of the sinking of the earth in consequence of a rain, and the disappearance of water at a certain point. This led him to suspect that there might be a tomb there, and by digging away the fallen fragments of rock on the side of the mountain he came upon the entrance. "There is a general similarity in these tombs, and so we will not weary you with repetitions by describing them all. "The tomb has a narrow entrance, from which there is a descending passage-way, and sometimes a staircase. There are long halls and lateral chambers, and now and then the real resting-place of the king is beneath the main hall, which contained a bogus mummy intended to mislead any unauthorized visitor. The Egyptians exhausted their brains in devices to conceal the royal mummies, and it is quite possible that in some cases they have succeeded. When Belzoni opened the tomb that bears his name he came upon a staircase at the end of the passage, which he descended; there he found a horizontal chamber terminating in another staircase, and at its foot was an oblong chamber, or pit, of considerable depth. "This appeared to be the end of the tomb, and it was, as an Hibernian might say, full of emptiness. "Belzoni was disappointed, as his search had been fruitless. While wondering what to do next, he struck his hammer against the wall at the top of the pit, and found that it gave forth a hollow sound. He reasoned that the sound indicated a chamber beyond, and that the apparently solid rock was only a wall of masonry, carefully covered with stucco and hieroglyphics.