This revival doubtless occurs more easily because these early records in relief and color not only suggest in their subject-matter that a child has been endowed with sufficient self-consciousness to wish to write down his own state of mind upon a wall, but also because the very primitive style of drawing to which the Egyptians adhered long after they had acquired a high degree of artistic freedom, is the most natural technique through which to convey so simple and archaic a message. The square shoulders of the men, the stairways done in profile, and a hundred other details, constantly remind one of a child’s drawings. It is as if the Egyptians had painstakingly portrayed everything that a child has felt in regard to death, and having, during the process, gradually discovered the style of drawing naturally employed by a child, had deliberately stiffened it into an unchanging convention. The result is that the traveller, reading in these drawings which stretch the length of three thousand years, the long endeavor to overcome death, finds that the experience of the two--the child and the primitive people--often become confused, or rather that they are curiously interrelated. This begins from the moment the traveller discovers that the earliest tombs surviving in Egypt, the mastabas,--which resemble the natural results of a child’s first effort to place one stone upon another,--are concerned only with size, as if that early crude belief in the power of physical bulk to protect the terrified human being against all shadowy evils were absolutely instinctive and universal. The mastabas gradually develop into the pyramids, of which Breasted says that “they are not only the earliest emergence of organized men and the triumph of concerted effort, they are likewise a silent, but eloquent, expression of the supreme endeavor to achieve immortality by sheer physical force.” Both the mastabas at Sahkara and the pyramids at Gizeh, in the sense of Tolstoy’s definition of art as that which reproduces in the spectator the state of consciousness of the artist, at once appeal to the child surviving in every adult, who insists irrationally, after the manner of children, upon sympathizing with the attempt to shut out death by strong walls. Certainly we can all vaguely remember, when death itself, or stories of ghosts, had come to our intimate child’s circle, that we went about saying to ourselves that we were “not afraid,” that it “could not come here,” that “the door was locked, the windows tight shut,” that “this was a big house,” and a great deal more talk of a similar sort.