‘The next morning at daybreak,’ says Warburton,[29] ‘we started for the Tombs of the Kings. I was mounted on a fine horse, belonging to the sheikh of the village, and the cool air of the morning, the rich prospect before us, and the cloudless sky, all conspired to impart life and pleasure to my relaxed and languid frame. I had been for a month almost confined to my pallet by illness, and now, mounted on a gallant barb, sweeping across the desert, with the mountain breezes breathing round me, I felt a glow of spirits and exhilaration of mind and body to which I had been long a stranger. For a couple of hours we continued along the plain, which was partially covered with wavy corn, but flecked widely here and there with desert tracts. Then we entered the gloomy mountain gorges, through which the Theban monarchs passed to their tombs. Our path lay through a narrow defile, between precipitous cliffs of rubble and calcareous strata, and some large boulders of coarse conglomerate lay strewn along this desolate valley, in which no living thing of earth or air ever met our view. The plains below may have been, perhaps, once swarming with life and covered with palaces; but the gloomy defile we were now traversing must have ever been as they now are, lonely, lifeless, desolate—a fit avenue to the tombs for which we were bound. Footnote 29: ‘The Crescent and the Cross.’ ‘After five or six miles’ travel, our guide stopped at the base of one of the precipices, and, laying his long spear against the rock, proceeded to light his torches. There was no entrance apparent at the distance of a few yards, nor was this great tomb betrayed to the outer world by any visible aperture, until discovered by Belzoni. This extraordinary man seems to have been one of the few who have hit off in life the lot for which Nature destined them. His sepulchral instincts might have been matter of envy to the ghouls; with such unerring certainty did he guess at the place containing the embalmed corpses most worthy of his body-snatching energies.