About half a mile north of El Gourni, are the magnificent, stupendous sepulchres, of Thebes. The mountains of the Thebaid come close behind the town; they are not run in upon one another like ridges, but stand insulated upon their bases; so that you can get round each of them. A hundred of these, it is said, are excavated into sepulchral, and a variety of other apartments. I went through seven of them with a great deal of fatigue. It is a solitary place; and my guides, either from a natural impatience and distaste that these people have at such employments, or, that their fears of the banditti that live in the caverns of the mountains were real, importuned me to return to the boat, even before I had begun my search, or got into the mountains where are the many large apartments of which I was in quest. In the first one of these I entered is the prodigious sarcophagus, some say of Menes, others of Osimandyas; possibly of neither. It is sixteen feet high, ten long, and six broad, of one piece of red-granite; and, as such, is, I suppose, the finest vase in the world. Its cover is still upon it, (broken on one side,) and it has a figure in relief on the outside. It is not probably the tomb of Osimandyas, because, Diodorus[120] says, that it was ten stadia from the tomb of the kings; whereas this is one among them. There have been some ornaments at the outer-pillars, or outer-entry, which have been broken and thrown down. Thence you descend through an inclined passage, I suppose, about twenty feet broad; I speak only by guess, for I did not measure. The side-walls, as well as the roof of this passage, are covered with a coat of stucco, of a finer and more equal grain, or surface, than any I ever saw in Europe. I found my black-lead pencil little more worn by it than by writing upon paper. Upon the left-hand side is the crocodile seizing upon the apis, and plunging him into the water. On the right-hand is the [121]scarabæus thebaicus, or the thebaic beetle, the first animal that is seen alive after the Nile retires from the land; and therefore thought to be an emblem of the resurrection. My own conjecture is, that the apis was the emblem of the arable land of Egypt; the crocodile, the typhon, or cacodæmon, the type of an over-abundant Nile; that the scarabæus was the land which had been overflowed, and from which the water had soon retired, and has nothing to do with the resurrection or immortality, neither of which at that time were in contemplation.