CHAPTER XII FACE TO FACE WITH THE PHARAOHS HOW would you like to own an Egyptian mum* my princess, perhaps two thousand years old? On my second visit to Egypt I was offered one at the museum. The price was just one hundred dollars in cash, and accompanying it was a cer¬ tificate showing that it had not been made in Germany. The excavations going on in the valley of the Nile had unearthed so many relics that the museum at Cairo had mummies and other antiques to sell. Hundreds of the ancient dead were being shipped to all parts of the world, and the ghoul-like officials added to their revenues by dis¬ posing of the surplus bodies of nobles who lived and ruled ages ago. The lady who was offered to me, with the usual accompaniment of a certificate of age, lay in the clothes in which she was buried. She was wrapped around with linen as yellow as saffron and her black face appeared to smile as I looked at her. She had been put up in spices, and I could almost smell the perfumes with which she was embalmed.

There is no place like this Museum of Cairo in which to study the Egypt of the past. Room after room is walled with the coffins of monarchs who reigned thousands of years ago, and in other caskets the bodies embalmed are exposed to view. I looked a long time upon the face of King Rameses who is supposed to have gone to school 96