Let us follow the western sun, and cross the stream, leaving behind us the life and animation of the great city. Here, too, is a city—Western Thebes[57]—and its streets contain a population vaster far than that upon the other side. But all is silent here; no man buys or sells or joins in festive mirth. It is the City of the Dead. Here lie in countless numbers the embalmed bodies of those who have passed away generation after generation: kings and priests—men, women, children—the freeman and the slave. The hills encircling the plain are pierced and honeycombed in all directions with passages and tombs. Here are the ‘eternal dwellings’ of those who on the other side inhabit ‘hostelries’ as strangers of a day. And far more thought and care are bestowed upon those than upon these.[58] There are large common tombs, in which the bodies of the poor lie ranged side by side. And there are the funeral chambers of the rich, with their sculptured façades, whence winding galleries lead into the heart of the rock. Shafts are sunk, false passages that lead nowhere are constructed. Everything is done that human ingenuity can suggest, if only the body hidden there might never be seen or handled again.[59] Nor is the silent city of the dead without its stately palaces and temples. The two colossal twin statues of Amenhotep III. sit there upon the plain, and behind them is his magnificent temple. A little farther is the Ramesseum, a great temple erected by Rameses ‘to his name,’ and to the memory of his ancestors, marvellous for size and splendour. In the face of the limestone cliff to the north-west arises the stately terraced temple of Queen Hatasu, and not far off is the narrow gorge leading to the desolate valley of the ‘tombs of the kings.’ The priests attached to the service of these temples must have lived in the neighbourhood and kept up intercourse with the world outside, and in Western Thebes were the dwellings of all those whose business was with the bodies of the dead,—of those who first opened the corpse, who were reckoned ceremonially unclean, and of those who skilfully embalmed and bandaged it afterwards. Not a day could have passed on which some company of mourners, rich or poor, did not land—their ‘dark freight, a vanished life;’ whilst now and again a gorgeous funeral procession wound its way through the narrow defile, bearing beneath a funeral tent of exquisite workmanship the body of some prince or princess of the Pharaoh’s house to its last long home in the western hills.