Mariette took this as a clue and went to work. The labor was most discouraging as the sand kept falling in almost as fast as it was taken out. An avenue six hundred feet long was cleared out, and sometimes it was necessary to dig the trench sixty or seventy feet deep. A hundred and fifty sphinxes were discovered, besides the pedestals of many others. The foundations of the temple were discovered and laid bare; many statues were found, and at last in 1861 the Apis Mausoleum or Burial place of the Sacred Bulls was opened. The avenue and the foundations of the temple are again covered with sand, and so is a portion of the Mausoleum, but the most interesting part is still kept open.
We left our donkeys at the house where M. Mariette lived during the excavation, and accompanied an Arab guide to the tomb. Entering through a door and descending some steps, we were in the vaults, which consist of parallel galleries, each more than two hundred yards long and united at the ends. The galleries are hewn out of the solid rock, and were evidently cut with great care, but there is nothing very remarkable about them. The wonderful feature of the place is the stone coffins in which the sacred bulls were buried. There are twenty-four of them in recesses, on the sides of the galleries, but never opposite each other, and they are about the heaviest things in the coffin line that anybody has ever seen. They vary a little in size, but the average may be taken at thirteen feet long, seven feet six inches wide, and eleven feet high.
Now stop and think before you go on; stop and think how large a room it would take to hold one of these coffins; well, each coffin is one solid piece of granite, from the quarries at Assouan, five hundred and eighty miles up the Nile, and is finished as nicely as you ever saw anything in the granite line. Four or five persons can sit comfortably inside, and one of them contains the
table and chairs where the Empress Eugenie, and the Prince and Princess of Wales took lunch when they came here. The lid of each coffin is in proportion to the rest of the work, and like it is of a single piece of granite. An effort was made a few years ago to remove one of the coffins, but it was unsuccessful.
The Egyptians knew some things that we don’t. We can’t move these stone coffins; they moved them along the Nile nearly six hundred miles, and from the East to the West bank, and put them in these galleries underground and exactly in the recesses where they wanted them, and they used them as the burial places of the sacred bulls of Memphis; the bulls that they worshipped as the incarnation of divinity.
All the region around here was a burial place, and many excavations have been made among the tombs. Thousands of mummies have been found, and doubtless thousands more might be discovered if further researches were made. It is four thousand years since some of these mummied gentlemen were pickled and preserved, and they have kept well; you may find them to-day as fresh as when they were planted, and they reflect creditably upon the mummy-sharps that put them up, and also upon the wonderfully dry climate of Egypt. I half suspect that the climate is responsible for the religious faith of the ancient Egyptians, and particularly for that part of it which bade them bestow so much care upon their tombs and the preservation of the body.