This he swore, trembling sorely, for he was very much afraid. Nor,
indeed, did he reveal them.
This done, I clambered through the opening, taking with me a coil of
rope, which I wound around my middle, and beckoned to Cleopatra to come.
Making fast the skirt of her robe, she came, and I drew her through the
opening, so that at length she stood behind me in the passage which
is lined with slabs of granite. After her came the eunuch, and he also
stood in the passage. Then, having taken counsel of the plan of the
passage that I had brought with me, and which, in signs that none but
the initiated can read, was copied from those ancient writings that had
come down to me through one-and-forty generations of my predecessors,
the Priests of this Pyramid of _Her_, and of the worship of the Temple
of the Divine Menkau-ra, the Osirian, I led the way through that
darksome place towards the utter silence of the tomb. Guided by the
feeble light of our lamps, we passed down the steep incline, gasping in
the heat and the thick, stagnated air. Presently we had left the region
of the masonry and were slipping down a gallery hewn in the living rock.
For twenty paces or more it ran steeply. Then its slope lessened and
shortly we found ourselves in a chamber painted white, so low that I,
being tall, had scarcely room to stand; but in length four paces, and
in breadth three, and cased throughout with sculptured panels.
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