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They would show for a second in the light of the torches, then vanish in the shadow like the phantoms of a dream. Below these narrow frescoes, lines of hieroglyphs, written perpendicularly like Chinese writing and separated by hollow lines, excited the erudite by the sacred mystery of their outlines.

Each race writes its line upon the book, as it passes; it erases the ancient Romanesque hieroglyphs on the frontispieces of cathedrals, and at the most one only sees dogma cropping out here and there, beneath the new symbol which it has deposited. The popular drapery hardly permits the religious skeleton to be suspected.

On its surface the hieroglyphs were then sketched in red ink, and were finally drawn in black, the ground being then roughly hammered out. There the work stopped, and the final scraping and dressing of the figures was never accomplished. The reading of the signs is therefore difficult, but enough is seen to show that the keeper of the tomb bore the name of Sabef.

Later, in the age of etiquette, it will show us Scarron on the very edge of Louis the Fourteenth's bed. Meanwhile it decorates coats of-arms, and draws upon knight, shields the symbolic hieroglyphs of feudalism. From the manners, it makes its way into the laws, numberless strange customs at test its passage through the institutions of the Middle Ages.

The first is the old Egyptian name, the second the Greek name adapted to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The stele was erected by Tekhtnebf, the last native king of Egypt, to commemorate his gifts to the temples of Neïth on the occasion of his accession at Sais.

"In Egypt, as far back as the monuments carry us, we find a highly-developed art, a highly organized government, and a highly-educated people. Egypt was emphatically a land of scribes and readers. Already in the days of the Old Empire, the Egyptian hieroglyphs had developed into a cursive hand."

Nearer the Lybian chain, from the Memnonian quarter inhabited by the undertakers, dissectors, and embalmers, went up into the blue air the red smoke of the natron boilers, for the work of death never ceased; in vain did life spread tumultuously around, the bandages were being prepared, the cases moulded, the coffins carved with hieroglyphs, and some cold body was stretched out upon the funeral bed, with feet of lion or jackal, waiting to have its toilet made for eternity.

Sometimes in the windy darkness he could see the red burn of New Brunswick bank, or the brilliant jewels of light clustered at Bestwood Colliery. Away in the dark hollow, nearer, the glare of the electric power-station disturbed the night. So again the wind swirled the rain across all these hieroglyphs of the countryside, familiar to him as his own breast. A motor-car was labouring up the hill.

On this score, the myth of the girdle deserves to fix the attention of the philosopher, who, however, ought to be satisfied to seek ideas corresponding with these pictures when the pure instinctive feeling throws out its discoveries, or, in other words, with explaining the hieroglyphs of sensation.

They seem to have some mysterious secret to convey to one another, but have perforce to remain silent, and for all the expressiveness of their attitudes their hands do not move. And hieroglyphs, too, repeated to infinity, envelop you on all sides like a multiple woof of mystery. Minute by minute now, everything amongst these rigid dead things grows more precise.