For everywhere I saw the face of
little Ali, with every feature exactly reproduced. Here he was bending
over a sacrifice, leading a sacred bull, feeding geese from a cup,
roasting a chicken, pulling a boat, carpentering, polishing, conducting
a monkey for a walk, or merely sitting bolt upright and sneering. There
were lines of little Alis with their hands held to their breasts, their
faces in profile, their knees rigid, in the happy tomb of Thi; but he
glanced at them unheeding, did not recognize his ancestors. And he did
not care to penetrate into the tombs of Mera and Meri-Ra-ankh, into
the Serapeum and the Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Perhaps he was right. The
Serapeum is grand in its vastness, with its long and high galleries and
its mighty vaults containing the huge granite sarcophagi of the sacred
bulls of Apis; Mera, red and white, welcomes you from an elevated niche
benignly; Ptah-hotep, priest of the fifth dynasty, receives you, seated
at a table that resembles a rake with long, yellow teeth standing on its
handle, and drinking stiffly a cup of wine. You see upon the wall near
by, with sympathy, a patient being plied by a naked and evidently an
unyielding physician with medicine from a jar that might have been
visited by Morgiana, a musician playing upon an instrument like a huge
and stringless harp. But it is the happy tomb of Thi that lingers
in your memory. In that tomb one sees proclaimed with a marvellous
ingenuity and expressiveness the joy and the activity of life.
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