Having entered the palace, and placed me under the hospitality of the noble Egyptian hierarch therein, the prince took leave of me. I would like to describe to you the taste and elegance of this abode, my dear mother; its gardens, fountains, flower-courts, paintings, and rich furniture. But I must first say a little more about the god Apis, who holds so prominent a place in the mythology of Egypt. In the hieroglyphic legends he is called Hapi, and his figurative sign on the monuments is a bull with a globe of the sun upon his head, and the hieroglyphic cruciform emblem of Life drawn near it. Numerous bronze figures of this bull are cast, whereupon they are consecrated, distributed over Egypt, and placed in the tombs of the priests. The time to which the sacred books limit the life of Apis is twenty-five years, which is a mystic number here; and if his representative does not die a natural death by that time, he is driven to the great fountain of the temple, where the priests were accustomed to bathe him (for he is fed and tended with the greatest delicacy, luxury, and servility by his priestly curators), and there, with hymns chanted and incense burning, they drown him amid many rites and ceremonies, all of which are written in the forty-two books of papyrus kept in the sacred archives of the oldest temple. No sooner does the god expire, than certain priests, who are selected for the purpose, go in search of some other bull; for they believe that the soul of Osiris has migrated into another body of one of these animals, or "Lords of Egypt," as I have heard them called. This belief of the constant transfer of himself by Osiris from the body of one bull to another, is but the expression of a popular notion here, that souls of men transmigrate from body to body; and my opinion is confirmed by a scene depicted in the judgment-hall of Osiris, where the god is represented as sending a soul, whose evil deeds outweighed his good ones, back to earth, and condemning it to enter the body of a hog, and so begin anew, from the lowest animal condition, to rise by successive transmigrations through other beasts, higher and higher; until he became man again, when, if he had acquired virtue in his probation, he was admitted to the houses of the gods and became immortal. The prince assures me that the belief in the transmigration of souls is almost universal in the Thebaïd, as well as among the lower orders in the northern nomes; and that the universal reverence for animals is, without doubt, in a great measure to be traced to this sentiment. A monstrous doctrine of the perpetual incarnation of deity in the form, not of man, but of the brute, seems to be the groundwork of all religious faith in Egypt. This idea is the key to the mysteries, inconsistencies, and grossness of their outward worship; the interpreter of their animal Pantheon.