Ten years ago not one of us had ever heard of Koti or Khnemhotep. Now we refer to them in the most casual way, as if we had roomed with them for a while. It is certainly a gay life we are leading over the cemetery circuit. Just think what rollicking fun it must be to revel day after day in sarcophagi and sepulchres, stumbling through subterranean passages and kicking up the dust of departed kings, peering down into mummy pits, also trying to stretch the imagination like a rubber band so that we may get the full significance of what is meant by 1500 B.C. People come to Egypt to cure nervous depression and then spend nine-tenths of their time hanging around tombs. Why come all the way to Egypt? Why not go out to Woodlawn and run foot races from one family vault to another?
[Illustration: _It is certainly a gay life_]
Mr. Peasley has no use for the tombs we have seen up to date. At Beni-Hassan we rode on donkeys and climbed hills for half an hour to inspect several large cubes of dim atmosphere surrounded by limestone. At Assiut we put in the best part of the afternoon toiling up to another gloomy cavern. While we stood in the main chamber of the tomb of Hapzefai (whoever he was), trying to pump up some enthusiasm, Mr. Peasley mopped his brow and declared himself.
"I'll tell you what I can do," he said. "I can take a hundred pounds of dynamite and a gang of dagoes and go anywhere along the Hudson and blow out a tomb in a week's time that will beat anything we've seen in Egypt. Then I'll hire a boy with a markin' brush to draw some one-legged men and some tall women with their heads turned the wrong way, and I'll charge six dollars to go in, and make my fortune."
The significance of the "six dollars" is that every traveller who wishes to visit the antiquities must pay a government tax of 120 piastres. He receives a "monument ticket," which he must show to the guard before entering any tomb or temple. I regret to say that the tickets are often passed along by departing travellers to those newly arrived, and as the guards do not read English, anything that looks like a monument ticket will satisfy the man at the door. At Beni-Hassan Mr. Peasley discovered, when he arrived at the tombs, that he had left his ticket at the boat. Fortunately, a fellow traveller had an extra ticket with him and Mr. Peasley had no difficulty in gaining admission to all the tombs under the name of "Miss Ella McPherson."