I could fill a
book with the description of them, but to do so would only be to repeat
what I have said, with variations.
Nearly all the bodies, so masterfully was the art with which they had
been treated, were as perfect as on the day of death thousands of years
before. Nothing came to injure them in the deep silence of the living
rock: they were beyond the reach of heat and cold and damp, and the
aromatic drugs with which they had been saturated were evidently
practically everlasting in their effect. Here and there, however, we saw
an exception, and in these cases, although the flesh looked sound enough
externally, if one touched it it fell in, and revealed the fact that the
figure was but a pile of dust. This arose, Ayesha told me, from these
particular bodies having, either owing to haste in the burial or
other causes, been soaked in the preservative,[*] instead of its being
injected into the substance of the flesh.
[*] Ayesha afterwards showed me the tree from the leaves of
which this ancient preservative was manufactured.
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