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Updated: May 21, 2025
I must confess, however, taking such transient glimpses as I did, I was more impressed with the extent of the Vatican, and the beautiful order in which it is kept, and its great sunny, open courts, with fountains, grass, and shrubs, and the views of Rome and the Campagna from its windows, more impressed with these, and with certain vastly capacious vases, and two seat sarcophagi, than with the statuary.
Peter's, a favour which women rarely obtain, and which I only owed to my having been a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. These catacombs consist of handsome passages and pillars of masonry, which do not, however, exceed eight or nine feet in height. A number of sarcophagi, containing the remains of emperors and popes, are here deposited. The roof of St.
Near the sarcophagi, and around the candelabra as far as the vicinity of the door, where the rascally trick was played, the light was brilliant as in a festal hall. Every blood-stain on the hand, every scratch, every wound which the desperate woman had torn with her own nails on her bosom, which gleamed snow-white from her black robes, was distinctly visible.
It is filled with mummies, sarcophagi, jewelry, coins and statues, one wooden statue shown being no less than four thousand six hundred years old. Anything less than five thousand years of age one gets to consider rather too modern to suit his taste. Upon some of the lids of the tombs the inscriptions are as fresh as if cut yesterday.
Fisher did not examine their nature closely, but they seemed to be small stone troughs, or perhaps little sarcophagi ringed round the battlements with flowers.
Against the dark background of the abominations committed by harsh rulers and worthless officials, the spectacle of these simple souls recalls those angels described by Dante, who give scarcely a sign of life and yet illuminate by their very presence the fearful darkness of hell; or those beautiful Greek sarcophagi upon which fair and graceful scenes are depicted upon a background of desolation.
On turning to the lower shelf, the visitor will at once be struck with the sarcophagi. Here are three Etruscan sarcophagi, two of alabaster, and one in peperino. On all three are recumbent female figures, and in front of the first the hunt of the Calydonian boar; of the second, Scylla; and of the third, a bas-relief representing Achilles dragging Penthesilea from her chariot.
The account he gives, in his novel, of the ancient city of Thebes, of the great necropolis in the valley of Biban el Molûk, of the subterranean tombs, of the precautions taken by the designers to baffle curiosity, of the form and ornamentation of the sarcophagi, of the mummy-cases, of the mummy itself, of the manners, customs, dress, and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, are marvellously accurate.
But I cannot die; and after I had fluttered across into Egypt, where the glaring light of the sun almost blinded me, I was thankful to find a ruined tomb or temple underground, where great marble sarcophagi were ranged around the walls, and where in the dusky light I could rest from my travels, in a place where I only knew the difference between night and day by the redness of the one sunbeam which stole in through a crevice, and the silvery blue of the moonbeam that succeeded it.
Most of the sarcophagi from these tombs have been removed and taken to the museum at Cairo, but in one to which we penetrate, hewn out at a slope so steep that we have difficulty in keeping our feet as we slither down, the mummy has been replaced and is left uncovered.
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