Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/239

 by building a church or endowing a religious order. One sees in a moment that Nekht must have worked lovingly at his own little "bijou residence" for eternity. It is nearly finished, but not quite; its incomplete condition meaning, it is to be feared, in this as in other cases, that the heir was of opinion that the deceased had spent quite enough money on his hobby, that it was really quite sufficiently decorated to do all reasonable credit to the family, and that on the whole the tomb might be closed without calling upon the artist to add the colours to that little wall-scene which he had just "blocked out" in black and white in one corner of the chamber when the late lamented paid the debt of nature. Unfortunately, the imperfection of the pictured record begins at the very point at which the dead man's deeply religious instincts would have made him particularly regret the failure to complete it. In this scene Nekht and his wife are seated at a table loaded with funereal offerings, and four