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Scenes of offerings to Ra Harmakhis, Hor, Tûm, or Amen are engraved on the sides of the pyramidion and on the upper part of the prism. Such is the usual type of obelisk; but we here and there meet with exceptions. A groove upon it shows that it was surmounted by some emblem in metal, perhaps a hawk, like the obelisk represented on a funerary stela in the Gizeh Museum.
The Nile is narrower there than above, and large stela, were erected there by Rameses II. his successor Mernephtah, on which were inscribed beautiful hymns to the Nile, and lists of the sacrifices to be offered at the Nile- festivals. "All my objections were disregarded, and now Nemu, go over to the grave of Anienophis, and wait there for me I wish to speak to your mother alone."
The picture was one of weary despair. The soldier, blanched and shaken, took a step forward as if to speak, but some realization brought him back to rigid attention against the stela. The light litter passed on. The regular tread of the men grew fainter and fainter and silence settled again about the well.
The general appearance of the recess is that of a somewhat narrow doorway. As a matter of fact, the stela symbolised the door leading to the private apartments of the dead, a door closed and sealed to the living.
Offerings of real provisions were not indispensable to this end; any chance visitor in times to come who should simply repeat the formula of the stela aloud would thereby secure the immediate enjoyment of all the good things enumerated to the unknown dead whom he evoked. The living having taken their departure, the Double was supposed to come out of his house and feed.
He could hear the rush of his own swift pulses in his ears-not the faintest sound besides. Such silence is there nowhere but in the city of the dead and at night, nowhere but in the desert. He tied the mule's bridle to a stela of granite covered with inscriptions, and went forward to the appointed place.
The stone sarcophagus, and even the coffin, are also covered with closely-written inscriptions. Precisely as the stela epitomised the whole chapel, so did the sarcophagus and coffin epitomise the sepulchral chamber, thus forming, as it were, a vault within a vault. Texts, tableaux, all thereon depicted, treat of the life of the Soul, and of its salvation in the world to come.
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