its mouth should be sealed up. According to the natives, there was evidently a vast hoard of wealth stored at the bottom of this tomb, and the would-be robbers had met their death at the hands of the demon in charge of it, who had seized each man by the throat as he came down the tunnel and had strangled him. The Egyptian peasants have a very strong belief in the power of such creatures of the spirit world. A native who was attempting recently to discover hidden treasure in a certain part of the desert, sacrificed a lamb each night above the spot where he believed the treasure to lie, in order to propitiate the _djin_ who guarded it. On the other hand, however, they have no superstition as regards the sanctity of the ancient dead, and they do not hesitate on that ground to rifle the tombs. Thousands of graves have been desecrated by these seekers after treasure, and it is very largely the result of this that scientific excavation is often so fruitless nowadays. When an excavator states that he has discovered a tomb, one takes it for granted that he means a _plundered_ tomb, unless he definitely says that it was intact, in which case one calls him a lucky fellow and regards him with green envy. And thus we come back to my remarks at the beginning of this chapter, that there is a painful disillusionment awaiting the man who comes to dig in Egypt in the hope of finding the golden cities of the Pharaohs or the bejewelled bodies of their dead. CHAPTER VIII THE TOMB OF TIY AND AKHNATON[4] In January, 1907, the excavations in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, which were being conducted each year under my supervision at the expense of Mr. Davis, brought to light the entrance of a tomb which, by its style, appeared to be that of a royal personage of the XVIIIth Dynasty. The Valley lies behind the cliffs which form the western boundary of Thebes, and is approached by a long winding road running between the rocks and rugged hills of the Lybian desert. Here the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth to the XXth Dynasties were buried in large sepulchres cut into the sides of the hills; and the excavations had for their object the removal of the _débris_ which had collected at the foot of these hills, in order that the tombs hidden beneath might be revealed. About sixty tombs are now open, some of which were already known to Greek and Roman travellers; and there are palpably not more than two or three still to be discovered.