“The Egyptians had some good ideas,” he ventured in a whisper. “That last idea about the ducks and venison hits me hard.”
“What did you say?” asked the professor, stopping short.
“I—I said the Egyptians had some good ideas,” stammered Teddy, a flush suffusing his face.
CHAPTER XII
The Night Prowler
“I’m glad you are so interested,” said Professor Bruce innocently. “Many of the people who come here have no real appreciation of what they see or hear. Their souls don’t rise above material things.”
Don gave Teddy a vigorous poke in the ribs that luckily passed unnoticed.
There were other tombs in the vicinity, that of Seti I and Amenophis II, the latter lying extended on his sarcophagus in the full glare of an electric light that seemed altogether too modern to be in harmony with a dwelling of the dead.
It was singular that the scene should have left no sense of depression on the spectators, such as they would have felt had they been in a modern cemetery. But so many centuries had elapsed that the tombs and their contents seemed to them merely historical relics. The haze of ages enveloped them. It was hard for them to think that the dried-up mummies had once been breathing living figures, that before these kings, whom the superstitious people regarded as gods, thousands had bowed in adoration, that upon their word hung the issues of life and death.
So it was with the feeling of being in a great museum that they passed from one to the other of the great monuments of antiquity adding momentarily to their knowledge of the mighty civilization that had flourished there in the dawn of recorded history, thousands of years before America had been discovered.
“Seems to me that the Egyptians thought more about dying than they did about living,” commented Don.