Heavens! how they roared and flared! No tar barrel
could have burnt as those mummies did. Nor was this all. Suddenly I
saw one great fellow seize a flaming human arm that had fallen from its
parent frame, and rush off into the darkness. Presently he stopped, and
a tall streak of fire shot up into the air, illumining the gloom, and
also the lamp from which it sprang. That lamp was the mummy of a woman
tied to a stout stake let into the rock, and he had fired her hair. On
he went a few paces and touched a second, then a third, and a fourth,
till at last we were surrounded on all three sides by a great ring of
bodies flaring furiously, the material with which they were preserved
having rendered them so inflammable that the flames would literally
spout out of the ears and mouth in tongues of fire a foot or more in
length.
Nero illuminated his gardens with live Christians soaked in tar, and
we were now treated to a similar spectacle, probably for the first time
since his day, only happily our lamps were not living ones.
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