Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/378

 288 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. J ' long course of centuries ; and this form is practically that which we find in the sepulchres of the great Theban kings and in some belonging to private individuals. It was through long and gloomy galleries, like those of the avpiy^, that the perilous voyage of the soul had to be undertaken. A boat carried it over the subterranean river, for in a country which had the Nile for its principal highway, every journey, even that of the sun through space, was looked upon as a navigation. Spacious saloons were imagined to exist among those galleries, chambers where the infernal gods and their acolytes sat enthroned in all the majesty of their office ; and so the passages of the tomb were expanded here and there into oblong or square chambers, their roofs supported by pillars left in the living rock. On either side of the audience chambers the imaeina- tion placed narrow passes and defiles, in which the walls seemed to close in upon the soul and bar its progress ; tortuous corridors and gloomy gulfs were fixed in these defiles, in which the terrible ministers of divine ven- geance held themselves in ambush, prepared to harass the march of souls not yet absolved, and to overwhelm with frio^htful tortures those ao-ainst whom sentence had already been pro- nounced. The tomb, therefore, had its snares and narrow passages, its gaping depths and the mazes of its intersecting and twisting corridors. To complete the resemblance nothing more was required than to paint and chisel upon the walls the figures of those gods, genii, and monsters who peopled the regions below. On one side the pious king may be seen, escorted by Amen-Ra and the other divinities whom he had worshipped during life, advancing to plead his cause before Osiris ; on the other, the punishment of the wicked helps to give i^c/al to the royal apotheosis by the contrasts which it affords. Thus the tombs of the Theban period embody the Egyptian solution of the problem which has always exercised mankind. Their subterranean corridors were a reproduction upon a small Fig. 1S5. — Anubis, in a funerary pavilion ; from a bas-relief. {Description de VAgvpte, i., pi. 74.)