"'There is also a Serapeum in a very sandy spot, where drifts of sand are raised by the wind to such a degree that we saw some sphinxes buried up to their heads, and others half covered.'
HUNTSMAN WITH DOGS AND GAME.
"This was a hint to the explorer, and he acted on it by following up the line of sphinxes till he came to the entrance of the great tomb. The guide showed us into the tomb, and then lighted candles, by which we explored a series of long galleries cut in the solid rock; altogether there are more than four hundred yards of these galleries, and they have on each side of them niches, like large rooms, for holding the coffins of the bulls. Some of these rooms are empty; but there still remain twenty-four coffins of solid granite in the places where they were left many years ago. The coffins are not all of the same size, but generally about thirteen feet long, eight wide, and eleven high; most of their covers are pushed aside or altogether removed, and it was evident, when the tomb was opened by Mariette Bey, that the place had been plundered, as nothing was found in the coffins except the mummy of a bull in one of them.
"There was a ladder by the side of one of the coffins, so that we climbed into it, and found that four or five persons could sit there comfortably. And think that these coffins were of solid blocks of granite, and were brought down the Nile from Assouan, and put in the rooms made for them! How they were put there nobody can tell; a thousand men worked for three weeks to take out one of these coffins, under the direction of an engineer, and, with all sorts of pulleys and apparatus, he only got it a short distance along the gallery. The enterprise was then abandoned, and the coffin stands where they left it.
"Irreverent visitors sometimes call these tombs the 'bull pits,' and they speak of the necropolis of Sakkara as the 'bone-yard.' But there are no bulls here at present, and the tombs of the surrounding region have been so thoroughly explored and plundered, that it would not be easy to find any bones in them."
