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Here he lingered for hours over ancient Egyptian tombstones; before colossal sarcophagi; thinking of the tough work Belzoni must have had of it with the young Memnon; endeavouring to realise the approach to the ancient Egyptian temples through rows of colossal and majestic sphinxes. Next he passed on to the ruins of Nineveh, and its mystic mounds.
Midway in the side and opposite walls are three other doorways, each of them three foot six inches in width, which lead into exactly similar square chambers, having a length of twelve feet two inches, and a width of ten feet nine. Chambers of the character here described contain in almost every instance stone sarcophagi. These are ranged along the walls, at a little distance from them.
But opposite, all along the sides of the painted cloister, the Amazons are wrestling with the youths on the stone of the sarcophagi; the chariots are dashing forward, the Tritons are splashing in the marble waves; the Bacchantæ are striking their timbrels in their dance with the satyrs; the birds are pecking at the grapes, the goats are nibbling at the vines; all is life, strong and splendid in its marble eternity.
There was a simple lawn of fine grass with a vast central basin surmounted by a figure of Venus, nude and white; and antique fragments, vases, statues, columns, and sarcophagi were ranged symmetrically all around the deserted, sunlit yet melancholy, sward.
It is astonishing what a vast amount of expense is here literally buried. "The ornamented parts are beneath the dome; the other parts are plain, heavy arches and low, almost numberless, and containing the sarcophagi of the Popes and other distinguished characters.
His name, and pictures of him are to be found on stones in the fortress of Cairo, on a relief in Florence, a statue in the Vatican, on sarcophagi in Stockholm and London, a statue in the Villa Albani and on a little temple of red granite at Leyden.
The Duke of Savoy, the Prince of Lorraine, the Cardinal Richelieu, and a hundred others have taken away just what they liked, and Arles to-day has hardly more to show of this vast cemetery than an avenue but a noble one of sarcophagi and some fragments of fine Gothic or Romanesque chapels lost in the midst of a desert."
They came to a rising ground more definitely marked by sarcophagi hewn from the solid rock, and covered by lids of such weight and solidity that a number of them had never been disturbed. Doubtless the dead within were lying as they had been left but when, and by whom? What disclosures there will be when at last the end is trumpeted in!
P. W. Norris, superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, he having been an eye-witness of what he relates in 1876. The Blackfeet, Sioux, and Navajos also bury in lodges, and the Indians of Bellingham Bay, according to Dr. J. F. Hammond, U. S. A., place their dead in carved wooden sarcophagi, inclosing these with a rectangular tent of some white material. Races of Pac.
Close to this piazza is a little church, also in the Byzantine style, where, enclosed by a wonderful network railing of very curious design and beautiful workmanship, are the finely sculptured sarcophagi of the Scaligers, the founders of the city.
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