A tall, lank, loose-jawed, genial Copt would show you the haunts of evil, and offers his services to procure you pleasure. You have said “No” to him; he stands there where you left him on the pavement in his long cotton rags, smiling gently and cogitatively—the same type as stood in the city of the Pharaohs in the old days of the Israelitish bondage. It is strange to reflect that they find in the mummies of those who lived so many thousands of years ago the marks of “the city’s disease,” and the sign of the impure strain. There is a community of sin. What was in ancient Egypt is in the world to-day and was not invented in any recent time but has been carried on from one human being to another, to many others, and from them to others still. I look at the mummies of Egypt, at the bright pictures of the people, fresh as if painted yesterday. These paintings on the coffin-lids live, they are the real people. You know that the brown, dry bodies wrapped in thick folds of linen did once walk, and were the beautiful society of some era five or six thousand years ago. There is in Cairo the unwrapped mummy of the majestical Pharaoh who would not let the children of Israel go. As you look at his face time is bridged over, and you see how brief a space is our vaunted history of man and what parochial dwellers in time we are, rolling our eyes and hushing our accents when we speak of a hundred or a thousand years, as if those seconds of being were of vast extent, tiring the angels to get over them. There lies old Pharaoh, brown, but still in the flesh. He has a Roman nose, distinguished features, the face of a man of learning; there is a look of Dante about him. His neck has shrunk to the size of a bird’s neck and his head rather dangles on it, but it is an actual head and an actual face. Pharaoh is unwrapped, but beside him stands an unopened pupa case; the linen is fresh as when new, and daintily folded and tied as on the day of burial five thousand years ago. A lotus flower lies in the coffin; it looks as if it had been picked last month and had wilted a little, and yet it may have been picked by the princess herself, and she was a daughter of one of the Pharaohs—perchance even of her who found and cherished the baby Moses. When you read of Jacob in the Old Testament, that— ... the physicians embalmed him. And forty days were fulfilled for him; for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed: and the Egyptians mourned for him threescore and ten days. And when the days of his mourning were past ... Joseph went up to bury his father: and with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt ... you realise that there is perhaps somewhere a mummy of Jacob, and a modern might see him face to face.