After a procession of two hours which was attended by unbroken cries, the car with the remains halted on the bank of the Nile. There the remains were removed from the boat-shaped car and borne to a real barge gilded, carved, covered with pictures, and furnished with white and purple sails.
The court ladies made one more attempt to take the mummy from the priests; again were heard all the choruses and the military music. After that the lady Niort's and some priests entered the barge which bore the royal mummy, the people hurled bouquets and garlands and the oars began to plash.
Ramses XII had left his palace for the last time and was moving on the Nile toward his tomb in Theban mountains. But on the way it was his duty, like a thoughtful ruler, to enter all the famed places and take farewell of them.
The journey lasted long. Thebes was five hundred miles distant higher up the river, along which the mummy had to visit between ten and twenty temples and take part in religious ceremonies.
Some days after the departure of Ramses XII to his eternal rest, Ramses XIII moved after him to rouse from sorrow by his presence the torpid hearts of his subjects, receive their homage and give offerings to divinities.
Behind the dead pharaoh, each on his own barge, went all the high priests, many of the senior priests, the richest landholders, and the greater part of the nomarchs. So the new pharaoh thought, not without sorrow, that his retinue would be very slender,
But it happened otherwise. At the side of Ramses XIII were all the generals, very many officials, many of the smaller nobility and all the minor priests, which more astonished than comforted the pharaoh.
This was merely the beginning. For when the barge of the youthful sovereign sailed out on the Nile there came to meet him such a mass of boats, great and small, rich and poor, that they almost hid the water. Sitting in those barges were naked families of earth-tillers and artisans, well-dressed merchants, Phoenicians in bright garments, adroit Greek sailors, and even Assyrians and Hittites.
The people of this throng did not shout, they howled; they were not delighted, they were frantic. Every moment some deputation broke its way to the pharaoh's barge to kiss the deck which his feet had touched, and to lay gifts before him: a handful of wheat, a bit of cloth, a simple earthen pitcher, a pair of birds, but, above all, a bunch of flowers. So that before the pharaoh had passed Memphis, his attendants were forced repeatedly to clear the barge of gifts and thus save it from sinking.
The younger priests said to one another that except Ramses the Great no pharaoh had ever been greeted with such boundless enthusiasm.