Page:Orczy--the gates of Kamt.djvu/135

 "Thy hand upon the seal, oh, beloved of the gods!"

With a slight frown Ur-tasen ordered the scribe to hand the document across to Hugh, who placed his name beside that of the Pharaoh in bold hieroglyphic characters:



Then the parchment was handed over by one of the judges to the relatives of the deceased, who, as silently as they had come, retired, bearing their dead away with them. The laws of Kamt had granted them leave to perform the last and solemn rites of embalming the body of their kinsman, and making the body a fitting habitation for the soul until such time as it should return once more upon earth from the land of shadows.

And the herald again called thrice upon a name, and again the dead was arraigned before the living, his virtues extolled by his friends, his sins magnified by his enemies; but in this case he was deemed unworthy of embalming; the soul should find no more that dwelling-place which had been the abode of cruelty and of fraud, of lying and of cheating, and it should be left to wander homeless in the dark shadows of death till it had sunk, a lifeless atom, merged in the immeasurable depths of Nu, the liquid chaos which is annihilation. The wailing of the relatives of this condemned corpse was truly pitiable: the law had decreed upon the evil-doer the sentence of eternal death. Two more cases were dealt with in the same way. Mr. Tankerville had often in his picturesque way related to us this judgment of the dead practised in ancient Egypt, and I remember once having seen a picture representing the circular hall, the judges and the accused;