on our ride, now sat and stood in picturesque groups round the entrance of the cave; beyond there was nothing to be seen but a waste of sand, which reflected the sun's glare so strongly that at last I was obliged to turn my back on the prospect, and peer down into the pleasant darkness we were going to explore. At first it was all dark, but by and by a little star of light seemed to rise from the bottom, and advance towards us. It looked so pretty and mysterious that I was almost sorry when I was obliged to acknowledge to myself that it was only Hassan with a torch in his hand come to tell us that Mr. H—— had lighted the candles in the tombs below, and that we must make haste or the lights would be burned out before we had seen all. We got up and followed the guide down a short steep descent, till we came to a vast underground gallery, I cannot call it anything else. The roof was arched and high, and it seemed to stretch on, and on, and on, to an immense distance. One could fancy oneself beginning a journey to the opposite end of the world, as one looked along from one feeble struggling light, placed in a niche in the wall, to another, a foot or two beyond, till the last light was swallowed up in thick darkness.

When our eyes had become a little accustomed to the obscurity, we discovered that there were recesses on each side of this great gallery, and that in each recess, or vast closet, cut in the solid rock, there was a sarcophagus of black stone, holding as we were told the remains of one of the sacred bulls. As one after another of these sacred animals died, fresh tombs were excavated for them in the solid rock, till their under-ground burial place grew to the size which we now see.

We walked along the gallery to some distance, looking

first on one side, and then on the other, at the great sarcophagi in their niches; they were all made of the same sort of stone, as far as we could judge, and there was no picture-writing here, on the walls or on the tombs, only each sarcophagus had on one side of it a small granite oval, called a cartouche, with the name written on it of the king in whose reign the sacred Apis died. When we came back to the entrance, our guide showed us some tablets of stone with inscriptions on them, let into the wall. They record visits paid by kings and other great people from Memphis, to the burial place of the Bulls, and the offerings they brought with them. It seems that when a sacred bull died and had been buried here, it was customary during a certain period after his death, perhaps till his successor was found, for people to come here, to pay their respects to him in his coffin, and when they had done so, they had a stone let into the wall that everybody might know they had performed their duty.

"How strange," I fancy you are saying to yourselves, "that people, wise people like the Egyptians, should come out here into the desert to worship a dead god." It is strange, but, like most other strange things, when we come to know more about it, the marvel becomes a little less inconceivable. The Egyptians believed that in the form of the bull Apis dwelt the pure soul of their god Pthah Sokar Osiris. When the bull

died, they thought the soul took to itself a new form, and the respect they paid to the dead body was perhaps designed to show the grief they felt during the time that Osiris withdrew his presence from them. When the new bull Apis was found, the whole nation burst into demonstrations of joy. You have heard, I dare say,

how angry this joy once made the Persian king Cambyses, and how disgusted he was with the Egyptians for their choice of a god.

We will talk more about Osiris by and by in the proper place; while we are still in the Apis tombs, let us think of the people, in whom we are most interested, who may have seen them lighted up, and thronged with adorers worshipping before the last occupier of a new sarcophagus.—Abraham ? Yes, Abraham may have been here. This vaulted roof probably had begun to be scooped out in Abraham's time. Perhaps, during his brief sojourn in Egypt, he may have wandered out here, and spoken, to those who were mourning for a dead god, of that living Lord who had lately revealed Himself to him, and to whom a short time before he had built an altar on the olive-crowned hill between Bethel, on the east, and Hai on the west.

Joseph probably witnessed the burial of more than one Apis, and Moses and the children of Israel in his day were, we know, familiar with the worship of Osiris under this and the kindred form practised at Heliopolis, and were acquainted with the Egyptian beliefs about him. It was the recollection of the splendours of the worship paid to this god that made the faithless Israelites regret the gods of Egypt, when they believed themselves forsaken in the desert. One of the stories about Osiris was that he had fought with Apophis the Giant, the personification of the sand of the desert. Who will save us from Apophis, if not Osiris ?Where be our gods to go before us? they cried. Aaron made them that molten image of a golden calf,

So

of which they had seen models enough in Memphis and

Heliopolis, and the people brought peace offerings, and eat and drank before it, and Moses, coming down from the mountain, where for forty days he had talked with God, felt that great shock of sorrow and indignation which caused him to throw down the two tables of stone, and break them at the foot of the mountain.

Thinking such thoughts as these, we set off on our way back to the river. Before we had proceeded far, we stopped once more before another strange-looking burrow in the sand, which we were told was the entrance to the place where the ibises and cats were buried. We felt much inclined to explore these, but some gentlemen who were just ascending from the depths as we rode up, dissuaded us from making the attempt. After hearing the fatigue they had undergone, we contented ourselves with looking at a single mummied ibis that had been brought to the upper regions; it was enclosed in a red pot, something like a chimney pot, sealed at one end. We heard that the cats were wrapped in mummy cloth like the human bodies, and arranged in their underground chambers in layers, one upon another, a most surprising number of them.

We felt sorry to leave this extraordinary place unexplored, but we had still a long ride before us, and we dared not linger. The evening had closed in, and the full moon was shining on the palm groves when we came in sight of our boat. I hope you are not more tired of my long letter, than we were of our long but most pleasant day's sightseeing.

LETTER II.

MY DEAR BOYS,

I took you to see the ruins of Memphis first, because I wished to begin our history at the beginning, with Menes, the founder of Memphis. The Pyramids lie seven miles nearer to Cairo than the site of the ancient Memphis does, but they were not built till the time of the fourth dynasty, so I deferred my description of them till now. You shall go with me to see them in this letter, and under their shade we will talk of the kings by whom they were built. Fancy us then leaving our boat on a very blowy morning. Our way lay first through a crowded Arab village where a market was going on. You can form no idea of the pushing and crowding of the people, the donkeys, and the camels, the shouts of the donkey drivers, the quarrels of the buyers and sellers, the general uproar that pervaded the whole place.

I feel half inclined to stop, and show you some of the curious figures that are moving about in the crowd. That bare-legged water-carrier, with his great goat-skin of water on his back; that man, carrying on his head a narrow wooden tray with flat loaves of bread and sugared cakes; his companion with a similar tray filled with little saucers containing sweetmeats; the