Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/113

to last. Scarabs, papyri, jewels, of startling age and yet undoubted genuineness, began to find their way into the hands of experts, and Egyptologists began to smell a rat. M. Maspero, the indefatigable Director of the Boulak Museum, was communicated with, and promptly betook himself to Thebes, armed with full powers of investigation. Abd-er-Rasûl was arrested by the police, examined—some say "put to the question" in the old grim sense of the phrase—imprisoned, released, and finally frightened into turning "Khedive's evidence" and making a clean breast of it to the Mudîr of Keneh. Then all the Royal mummies were exhumed, and as some of them were found to be decomposing, M. Maspero decided to unroll the whole collection, and Rameses II. was the first of these mighty rulers and builders whose features were shown to the world once more, after a lapse of 3200 years. That exposure meant the final defeat of the crowning effort of his religious creed. Osiris and his forty-