第63章

"Uplift the cloths, O Holly," said Ayesha, but when Iput out my hand to do so I drew it back again.It seemed like sacrilege, and to speak the truth I was awed by the dread solemnity of the place, and of the presences before us.Then, with a little laugh at my fears, she drew them herself, only to discover other and yet finer cloths lying over the forms upon the stone bench.These also she withdrew, and then for the first time for thousands upon thousands of years of did living eyes look upon the face of that chilly dead.It was a woman; she might have been thirty-five years of age, or perhaps a little less, and had certainly been beautiful.Even now her calm, clear-cut features, marked out with delicate eyebrows and long eyelashes which threw little lines of the shadow of the lamplight upon the ivory face, were wonderfully beautiful.There, robed in white, down which her blue black hair was streaming, she slept her last long sleep, and on her arm, its face pressed against her breast, there lay a little babe.So sweet was the sight, although so awful, thatI confess it without shameI could scarcely withhold my tears.It took me back across the dim gulf of the ages to some happy home in dead Imperial Ko^r, where this winsome lady girt about with beauty had lived and died, and dying taken her last-born with her to the tomb.There they were before us, mother and babe, the white memories of a forgotten human history speaking more eloquently to the heart than could any written record of their lives.Reverently I replaced the grave-cloths, and, with a sigh that flowers so fair should, in the purpose of the Everlasting, have only bloomed to be gathered to the grave, I turned to the body on the opposite shelf, and gently unveiled it.It was that of a man in advanced life, with a long, grizzled beard, and also robed in white, probably the husband of the lady, who, after surviving her many years, came at last to sleep once more for good and all beside her.

We left the place and entered others, It would be too long to describe the many things I saw in them.Each one had its occupants, for the fice hundred and odd years that elapsed between the completion of the cave and the destruction of the race had evidently sufficed to fill these catacombs, numberless as they were, and all appeared to have been undisturbed since the day when they were placed there.I could fill a book with the description of them, but to do so would only be to repeat what I have said, with variations.

Nearly all the bodies, so masterly was the art with which they had been treated, were as perfect as on the day of death thousands of years before.Nothing came to injure them in the deep silence of the living rock;they were beyond the reach of heat and cold and damp, and the aromatic drugs with which they had been saturated were evidently practically everlasting in their effect.Here and there, however, we saw an exception, and in these cases, although the flesh looked sound enough externally, if one touched it it fell in, and revealed the fact that the figure was but a pile of dust.This arose, Ayesha told me, from these particular bodies having, either owing to haste in the burial or other causes, been soaked in the preservative, instead of its being injected into the substance of the flesh.

About the last tomb we visited I must, however, say one word, for its contents spoke even more eloquently to the human sympathies than those of the first.It had but two occupants, and they lay together on a single shelf.I withdrew the grave-cloths, and there, clasped heart to heart, were a young man and a blooming girl.Her head rested on his arm, and his lips were pressed against her brow.I opened the man's linen robe, and there over his heart was a dagger-wound, and beneath the girl's fair breast was a like cruel stab, through which her life had ebbed away.On the rock above was an inscription in three words.

Ayesha translated it.It was "Wedded in Death."What was the life-history of these two, who, of a truth, were beautiful in their lives, and in their death were not divided?