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Updated: May 2, 2025
The old aqueduct, which supplied the courts of sacrifice and the Subterranean crypts of the temple where the mysteries of Serapis were celebrated, passed close by the back-wall of this warehouse. Since the destruction of the watercourse, under the Emperor Julian, the underground conduit had been dry and empty, and a man by slightly stooping could readily pass through it unseen into the Serapeum.
Its aspect is all the more sinister because, parallel with the Tours d'Argent and de Montgomery, you discover those mysterious vaulted and overwhelming crypts which lead to the cells occupied by the Queen and Madame Elizabeth, and to those known as the secret cells. This maze of masonry, after being of old the scene of royal festivities, is now the basement of the Palais de Justice.
But this time the young brave was in error, for only a few moments later both fugitives caught sight of a dim light in hurried motion far towards the entrance to these underground crypts. That warned them of added peril, and Ixtli's chuckle died abruptly away.
These preliminaries occupy three days; during which rises, as if by magic, or from the crypts below, an immense catafalque, a colossal architectural structure, which fills the nave of that basilica illustrated by inscriptions, and adorned by statuary. Before this huge monument, for nine days funeral rites are performed, closed by a funeral oration.
General Grant visited also, by invitation, some of the great wine-cellars of Frankfort, and was conducted through the immense crypts of Henninger's brewery, which is one of the largest establishments of the kind on the Continent. As he was about to leave Henninger's, he was requested to write his name in the visitors' register.
Great cities are the poison-glands of civilization everywhere; but the secretions of those hideous crypts and blind passages that empty themselves into the thoroughfares of English towns are so deadly, that, but for her penal colonies, England, girt by water, as the scorpion with flame, would perish, self-stung, by her own venom.
Priesthood works out its task, age after age: now smoothing penitent death-beds, consecrating graves! feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, incarnating the Christian precepts, in an, age of rapine and homicide, doing a thousand deeds of love and charity among the obscure and forsaken deeds of which there shall never be human chronicle, but a leaf or two, perhaps, in the recording angel's book; hiving precious honey from the few flowers of gentle, art which bloom upon a howling wilderness; holding up the light of science over a stormy sea; treasuring in convents and crypts the few fossils of antique learning which become visible, as the extinct Megatherium of an elder world reappears after the gothic deluge; and now, careering in helm and hauberk with the other ruffians, bandying blows in the thickest of the fight, blasting with bell, book, and candle its trembling enemies, while sovereigns, at the head of armies, grovel in the dust and offer abject submission for the kiss of peace; exercising the same conjury over ignorant baron and cowardly hind, making the fiction of apostolic authority to bind and loose, as prolific in acres as the other divine right to have and hold; thus the force of cultivated intellect, wielded by a chosen few and sanctioned by supernatural authority, becomes as potent as the sword.
The Christians were assembled in one of the crypts of the catacombs. "The Capitol is burning; that is the heathen's Zion," said Alexander. "The Lord of Hosts avenges his destroyed Jerusalem." "Say not 'avenges, say 'punishes." "Someone is coming down the passage." "Is it a brother?" "No, he makes no obeisance before the cross." "Then it is an executioner."
Bees are not the only occupants of the temple, however, for swallows, pigeons, and owls nest in their quiet interiors, and the dark passages and crypts are alive with bats. There are many other temples in Egypt of which I would like to tell you had I room to do so, but you may presently read more about them in books specially devoted to this subject.
Jean Ingelow tells us of 'a Dead Year' 'cased in cedar, and shut in a sacred gloom; but I have seven to shroud and bury; and will the day ever dawn when I can truly say: Silent they rest, in solemn salvatory'? Go out, dear, into the sunshine; you look so weary. Leave me alone in the cold crypts of memory; you need not be afraid, I have no second vial of poison."
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