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Updated: May 12, 2025
They set out to walk to the villa. As they went through the little town, Nigel pointed out the various "objects of interest": the antiquity shops, where may be purchased rings, necklaces, and amulets, blue and green "servants of the dead," scarabs, winged discs, and mummy-cases; the mosque, a Coptic church, cafés, the garden of the Hôtel de Luxor.
Among other customs that they still clung to, was that of making mummies of the bodies of the dead. St. Anthony had tried to dissuade the Christian converts from that practice; not because the mummy-cases were covered with pagan inscriptions, but he boldly asserted, what a very little reading would have disproved, that every mode of treating a dead body, beside burial, was forbidden in the Bible.
There was free choice for the visitors of this pattern-room in the matter of mummy-cases and cloths, as well as of necklets, scarabaei, statuettes, Uza-eyes, girdles, head-rests, triangles, split-rings, staves, and other symbolic objects, which were attached to the dead as sacred amulets, or bound up in the wrappings.
She was draped from head to foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously studied from that of ancient Egypt, as revealed by the strange sculpture of that country, its coins, drawings, painted mummy-cases, and whatever other tokens have been dug out of its pyramids, graves, and catacombs.
Those most cared for lie in boxes of rough-hewn wood, neither painted nor inscribed. Many are huddled into old coffins which have not even been altered to suit the size of the new occupant, or into a composite contrivance made of the fragments of three or four broken mummy-cases. As to funerary furniture, it was out of the question for such poor souls as these.
The vague shapes of the mummy-cases standing erect in the wall-cases, loomed out dim and gigantic, silent watchers keeping their vigil with the memories of untold centuries locked in their shadowy breasts. They were an awesome company.
Miss Edwards, in her very interesting book, "A Thousand Miles up the Nile," thus speaks of it: "Every one knows how this scarab was adopted by the Egyptians as an emblem of creative power and the immortality of the soul; it is to be seen in the wall-sculptures, on the tombs, cut out in precious stones and worn as an ornament, buried in the mummy-cases, and a figure of the beetle forms a hieroglyph, and represents a word signifying 'To be and to transform. If actual worship was not paid to Scaraboeus Sacer, it was, at any rate, regarded with the greatest reverence and a vast amount of symbolism drawn from its various characteristics."
Athelstone was bent over her desk writing; Brander was yawning over a novel in his corner, and neither paid any attention to him. So he busied himself going over the mummy-cases, and by the time he had worked around to the two beside Mrs. Athelstone he had himself well in hand, outwardly. But he was still so shaken internally that he knocked the black case rather roughly as he dusted.
The widow and the steward of the wealthy Superior of the temple of Hatasu, and with them a priest of high rank, were in eager discussion with the officials of the embalming-House, and were selecting the most costly of the patterns of mummy-cases which were offered to their inspection, the finest linen, and amulets of malachite, and lapis-lazuli, of blood-stone, carnelian and green felspar, as well as the most elegant alabaster canopi for the deceased; his body was to be enclosed first in a sort of case of papier-mache, and then in a wooden and a stone coffin.
They for the most part gave up the preparation of magnificent tombs, and employed such wealth as remained to them in the fabrication of fine mummy-cases carved in sycamore wood. The beauty of their coffins, therefore, but affords an additional proof of their weakness and poverty.
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