Then, with a little laugh at my fears, she drew
them herself, only to discover other and yet finer cloths lying over the
forms upon the stone bench. These also she withdrew, and then for the
first for thousands upon thousands of years did living eyes look upon
the face of that chilly dead. It was a woman; she might have been
thirty-five years of age, or perhaps a little less, and had certainly
been beautiful. Even now her calm clear-cut features, marked out with
delicate eyebrows and long eyelashes which threw little lines of the
shadow of the lamplight upon the ivory face, were wonderfully beautiful.
There, robed in white, down which her blue-black hair was streaming, she
slept her last long sleep, and on her arm, its face pressed against her
breast, there lay a little babe. So sweet was the sight, although so
awful, that--I confess it without shame--I could scarcely withhold my
tears. It took me back across the dim gulf of ages to some happy home in
dead Imperial Kor, where this winsome lady girt about with beauty had
lived and died, and dying taken her last-born with her to the tomb.
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