Their gigantic statues are certainly very curious. I saw a hand and
arm up to the shoulder fifteen feet in length, and made of some stone
that seemed harder and heavier than granite, not having lost its polish
in all the rough usage that it has undergone. There was a fist on a
still larger scale, almost as big as a hogshead. Hideous, blubber-lipped
faces of giants, and human shapes with beasts' heads on them. The
Egyptian controverted Nature in all things, only using it as a groundwork
to depict, the unnatural upon. Their mummifying process is a result of
this tendency. We saw one very perfect mummy,--a priestess, with
apparently only one more fold of linen betwixt us and her antique flesh,
and this fitting closely to her person from head to foot, so that we
could see the lineaments of her face and the shape of her limbs as
perfectly as if quite bare. I judge that she may have been very
beautiful in her day,--whenever that was. One or two of the poor thing's
toes (her feet were wonderfully small and delicate) protruded from the
linen, and, perhaps, not having been so perfectly embalmed, the flesh had
fallen away, leaving only some little bones. I don't think this young
woman has gained much by not turning to dust in the time of the Pharaohs.
We also saw some bones of a king that had been taken out of a pyramid; a
very fragmentary skeleton. Among the classic marbles I peeped into an
urn that once contained the ashes of dead people, and the bottom still
had an ashy hue.
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