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The Museums of Cairo 265
There is the air of grace and space that you get in an
Italian museum. Right and left as you enter, you have the
general effect of an Egyptian temple, while the principal
hall, which acts as a sort of tribune, is suggestive of a church
with galleries. As you enter this tribune you pass two superb
sphinxes of Thothmes III., as perfect as when they left the
workshop, and behind them are two of the most marvellous
exhibits in the collection— funeral boats which floated on the
waters of the Nile nearly five thousand years ago at the funeral
of the Pharaoh Autuiabri Horus, hardly to be distinguished in
form from boats in use to-day.
Last time I went into this tribune, the summer had begun
and tourists were growing few, so the new discoveries of the
year were being unpacked and put into their places. It added
to the make-believe one gets in a museum to hear the chant
of the Arabs as they hoisted a new Colossus twenty feet high
into its place with the eyes of former Colossi fixed upon them.
To me some of the most interesting things in the Museum
are on the ground floor in the galleries to the left, for it is
there that you find the painted statues of the Pharaohs and
their subjects, which are so lifelike that you expect to see
them move. The statue of the Sheikh-el-Beled, that is the
Omdeh, though it is not painted, is the most lifelike of them
all ; he has the face of a self-satisfied American athlete. In
the same room is the inimitable scribe, No. 78, who has been
kneeling in the attitude of attention waiting to take down
dictation all these thousands of years, and the diorite statue
of Chephren, the Pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, who built
the second Pyramid of Gizeh, and has an expression as subtle
as that of Leonardo da Vinci's Monna Lisa. In an adjoining
room is the bronze statue of Pepi the First, very elegant, very
lifelike, almost as beautiful as Greek statues produced nearly
three thousand years later. Close by are ten beautiful and
perfect statues of Usertsen I., sitting round a tomb.
The princes of Ancient Egypt were fond of being sculptured
with their wives or mothers sitting beside them, with their
hands resting on each other ; the statues are not always
charming in art, but they are always charming in feeling. The