Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/240

 priestly officials are bringing up haunches of veal or beef. To have left this plain instead of coloured was a grave omission. Did Nekht suffer for it in the underworld, one wonders? Did it undo the work of those multiplied prayers in hieroglyphic, the incessant reiteration of which on the walls of Egyptian mortuary-chambers produces almost an effect of passionate appeal? Osiris and Harmachis, and Ammon and Anubis are again and again beseeched to grant favours to "the double of the temple-servant, Nekht, a free passport for the disembodied soul to the regions of the dead, a coming-in and going-out from the underworld, not being repulsed at its gates." It is to be hoped that there was no hitch in the arrangements.

The temple-servant, however, was evidently a cheery soul, and seems to have been not less interested in the things of this world than in those of the other. It is this which brings him so much nearer to us than all the conquering and building kings who have raised