Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/112

88 were Royal personages, and that their lucky discoverer had made a "find" of the greatest value. They were the mummies of kings, queens, and princesses belonging to no fewer than five Egyptian dynasties, and among them was that of Rameses the Great.

But alas! for Abd-er-Rasûl! They were too heavy for one man to remove, or even effectively to rifle. He had to let two of his brothers and one of his sons into the secret, and unable to dispose of the mummies en gros they determined to exploit them en détail. For some time the firm drove a prosperous trade among chance tourists on the Nile, selling them these priceless treasures doubtless for, comparatively speaking, so many "songs," and replenishing their store, whenever it ran short, by gruesome descents, under cover of the night, to the bottom of these long hidden tombs, forty feet beneath the earth's surface, and approached by a sculptured and pictured corridor of seventy yards in length. The game, however, was too good