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Updated: June 8, 2025
On either side open other chambers into which the electricity permits us to see quite clearly, and opposite, at the end of the hall, a large crypt is revealed, which one divines instinctively must be the resting-place of the Pharaoh. What a prodigious labour must have been entailed by this perforation of the living rock! And this hypogeum is not unique.
The existence of the central chamber, with its careful work and laborious imitation of an open-air 'temple, is against this interpretation. It has therefore been suggested that the hypogeum was meant for a burial place, and that the central chamber was the chapel or sanctuary in which the funeral rites were performed, after which the body was buried in one of the smaller rooms.
"I can place at your disposal," he went on, "some hundred energetic fellahs who, under the spur of whip and bakshîsh, would dig with their finger-nails to the very centre of the earth. We may try, if it pleases your lordship, to clear away a buried sphinx or a shrine, or to open up a hypogeum."
A thickly carpeted corridor lay outside, a corridor silent as the hypogeum of the Apis, secretive, gorgeous, with tasseled silk curtains and hanging lamps. Jones judged these lamps to be of silver and worth a thousand dollars apiece.
At last the principal artery of the hypogeum appears, a thoroughfare more than five hundred yards long, cut in the rock, where the Bedouins have prepared for us the customary feeble light. It is a place of fearful aspect. As soon as one enters one is seized by the sense of a mournfulness beyond words, by an oppression as of something too heavy, too crushing, almost superhuman.
The dust, which in Egypt is as eternal as granite, had moulded the print and preserved it for more than thirty centuries, just as the hardened diluvian mud has preserved the tracks of the animals which last traversed it. "See," said Evandale to Rumphius, "that human footprint which is directed towards the exit from the hypogeum!
But it was evident that no very large number of persons could find room in the hypogeum; hence Vinicius divined without difficulty that the ceremony would take place outside, in the space where a very numerous throng was soon gathered. As far as the eye could reach, lantern gleamed near lantern, but many of those who came had no light whatever.
Violate the tombs, if she has taken refuge in the abodes of death, far within some passage or hypogeum. Seek her out as Isis sought her husband Osiris torn away by Typhon, and, dead or alive, bring her back, or by the uræus of my pschent, by the lotus of my sceptre, you shall perish in hideous tortures."
It is in this room that the remarkable nature of the work in the hypogeum is most apparent. On entering it one sees at once that the intention of the original excavator was to produce in solid rock underground a copy of a megalithic structure above ground.
On one side is a row of hotels and shops, all European in character hairdressers, perfumers, and numerous dark rooms for the use of the many amateur photographers, who make a point of taking away with them photographs of their travelling companions grouped tastefully before some celebrated hypogeum. And then numerous cafes, where the whisky is of excellent quality.
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