THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS Crossing the river in a ferry boat, I rode for an hour or more through the desert before I came into the Valley of the Kings. My donkey boy was a good one and his don¬ keys were young. His name was Joseph, and the brute I bestrode was called “Gingerbread/' We traversed green fields, winding in and out along the canals, until we came to the desert and entered a gorge walled with rocks of yellow limestone and a conglomerate mixture of flint and limestone of curious formation. The gorge shows evidences of having been cut out by some mighty stream of the past. There are masses of debris along the sides, and the way is rough except on the road which has been made by the explorers.

Looking at the valley from the Nile one would not sup¬ pose it to be anything other than a desert ravine, so 1 did not at first realize that it was a cemetery. There are nei¬ ther gravestones nor monuments, for the kings obliterated every sign that might indicate their burial places. They dug out great chambers under the bed of this dried-up river and built cisterns for their proper drainage, but when they had finished they did all they could to make the spot look as it was in nature. For this reason their tombs re¬ mained for ages untouched and unknown.

From time to time, however, one or another was dis¬ covered. Strabo, the Greek geographer, who was alive when Christ was born, speaks of forty of them as being worthy of a visit, and others are mentioned by subsequent writers. Later they were again lost, and not until in our generation when some Arabs began to sell curious antiqui¬ ties was it learned that the tombs had been rediscovered and were being rifled by these vandals. The archaeolo¬ gists then went to work on their explorations which resulted 119