In the presence of these primitive attempts to defeat death, and without the conscious aid of memory, I found myself living over the emotions of a child six years old, saying some such words as I sat on the middle of the stairway in my own home, which yet seemed alien because all the members of the family had gone to the funeral of a relative and would not be back until evening, “long after you are in bed,” they had said. In this moment of loneliness and horror, I depended absolutely upon the brick walls of the house to keep out the prowling terror, and neither the talk of kindly Polly, who awkwardly and unsuccessfully reduced an unwieldy theology to child-language, nor the strings of paper dolls cut by a visitor, gave me the slightest comfort. Only the blank wall of the stairway seemed to afford protection in this bleak moment against the formless peril. Doubtless these huge tombs were built to preserve from destruction the royal bodies which were hidden within them at the end of tortuous and carefully concealed passages; but both the gigantic structures in the vicinity of Memphis, and the everlasting hills, which were later utilized at Thebes, inevitably give the impression that death is defied and shut out by massive defences. Even when the traveller sees that the Egyptians defeated their object by the very success of the Gizeh pyramids--for when their overwhelming bulk could not be enlarged and their bewildering labyrinths could not be multiplied, effort along that line perforce ceased--there is something in the next attempt of the Egyptians to overcome death which the child within us again recognizes as an old experience. One who takes pains to inquire concerning the meaning of the texts which were inscribed on the inner walls of the pyramids and the early tombs, finds that the familiar terror of death is still there although expressed somewhat more subtly; that the Egyptians are trying to outwit death by magic tricks. These texts are designed to teach the rites that redeem a man from death and insure his continuance of life, not only beyond the grave but in the grave itself. “He who sayeth this chapter and who has been justified in the waters of Natron, he shall come forth the day after his burial.” Because to recite them was to fight successfully against the enemies of the dead, these texts came to be inscribed on tombs, on coffins, and on the papyrus hung around the neck of a mummy. But woe to the man who was buried without the texts: “He who knoweth not this chapter cannot come forth by day.” Access to Paradise and all its joys was granted to any one, good or bad, who knew the formulæ, for in the first stages of Egyptian development, as in all other civilizations, the gods did not concern themselves with the conduct of a man toward other men, but solely with his duty to the gods themselves.