The ride to the tombs, which takes about an hour, and the latter half of which lies through an arid valley, is very striking from the form and colour of the mountains. Nothing announces that one is approaching the city of the dead, and it is not till you stand before them that you become aware of the plain square openings which lead down to these magnificent last resting-places of the kings. It was a right royal idea this, of the old rulers of Egypt, to plunge these shafts into the bowels of the rock, and give themselves a mountain for a tombstone over the palace which was their grave. The design of these houses of the dead is simple and apparently always much the same: a long corridor, sometimes with lateral galleries, sometimes with recesses or small chambers on each side, leads downwards by a not very rapid incline to a great hall, in the centre of which is the sarcophagus which contained the mummy of the king in its magnificent case; these cases have of course been all removed. All these lateral chambers were also originally filled with mummies--those, I believe, of the relations of the sovereign. The walls of these subterranean palaces and the ceilings are adorned throughout with coloured hieroglyphs and flat sculptured "graven images" representing mostly sacred and mystical scenes, but often, also, illustrating the different trades and crafts practised by the Egyptians. These paintings are of high interest from an ethnographic point of view--Poynter would have a fit over them. In the innermost places scores of bats dart about in intense alarm. The effect of the scanty light from the candles on these painted walls and on the dark bony forms of the Arabs is extremely fine--what your literary tourist would call "worthy of the pencil of Rembrandt."