This part of the Necropolis was usually visited by lamp-light, and under the flare of torches, before the return of the God to his own temple and the mystery-play on the sacred lake, which did not begin till midnight.
Behind the God, in a vase of transparent crystal, and borne high on a pole that all the multitude might see it, was the heart of the sacred ram.
Our friends, after they had laid their wreaths on the magnificent altars of their royal ancestors without being recognized, late in the afternoon joined the throng who followed the procession. They mounted the eastern cliff of the hills close by the tomb of Mena's forefathers, which a prophet of Amon, named Neferhotep--Mena's great-grandfather--had constructed. Its narrow doorway was besieged by a crowd, for within the first of the rock-chambers of which it consisted, a harper was singing a dirge for the long-since buried prophet, his wife and his sister. The song had been composed by the poet attached to his house; it was graven in the stone of the second rock-room of the tomb, and Neferhotep had left a plot of ground in trust to the Necropolis, with the charge of administering its revenues for the payment of a minstrel, who every-year at the feast of the dead should sing the monody to the accompaniment of his lute.
[The tomb of Neferhotep is well preserved, and in it the inscription from which the monody is translated.] The charioteer well knew this dirge for his ancestor, and had often sung it to Nefert, who had accompanied him on her lute; for in their hours of joy also--nay especially--the Egyptians were wont to remember their dead.
Now the three companions listened to the minstrel as he sang: "Now the great man is at rest, Gone to practise sweeter duties. Those that die are the elect Since the Gods have left the earth. Old men pass and young men come; Yea, a new Sun rises daily When the old sun has found rest In the bosom of the night.
"Hail, O Prophet! on this feast day Odorous balsams, fragrant resins Here we bring--and offer garlands, Throwing flowers down before thee, And before thy much-loved sister, Who has found her rest beside thee.
"Songs we sing, and strike the lyre To thy memory, and thine honor. All our cares are now forgotten, Joy and hope our breasts are filling; For the day of our departure Now draws near, and in the silence Of the farther shore is rest."
When the song ceased, several people pressed into the little oratory to express their gratitude to the deceased prophet by laying a few flowers on his altar. Nefert and Rameri also went in, and when Nefert had offered a long and silent prayer to the glorified spirits of her dead, that they might watch over Mena, she laid her garland beside the grave in which her husband's mother rested.