Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/232

 "double" in the other world. This has naturally raised the question why Egyptian tombs are not more numerous than they are; to which the answer current among Irish students of Egyptology is that as a matter of fact they are considerably more numerous than that, only they have not yet been discovered. It was not, of course, to be expected that the private citizen—even the "prominent" citizen of ancient Thebes or Memphis—could afford to hew out and decorate for himself a subterranean sepulchre on the scale of a Seti; and many of the death-chambers of such persons have no doubt crumbled into irremediable decay. But it is probable that very many more are only awaiting the spade of the excavator. Their smaller dimensions have made them more difficult to light upon and to extricate from the heaped-up dust of ages, than are the tombs of the kings, queens, princesses, and high-priests which have been discovered and laid open to the inspection of the modern