CHAPTER 3 - THE ANNEXE (A STORE-ROOM)

Summary

Strange and beautiful objects call for wonder, conjecture and fair words, but are they not all signs of the thought and progress of the age to which they belong? Facts, too, also give food for reflection.

During the previous two seasons in the Innermost Treasury we found little cause for criticism upon the general arrangement and state of the objects with which we had to deal. In this winter's work, however, we must qualify our account with a grain of question!

In contrast to the comparative order and harmony of the contents of the Innermost Treasury, we find in this last chamber—the Annexe or Store-room—a jumble of every kind of funerary chattels, tumbled any way one upon the other, almost defying description. Bedsteads, chairs, stools, footstools, hassocks, game-boards, baskets of fruits, every kind of alabaster vessel and pottery wine-jars, boxes of funerary figures, toys, shields, bows and arrows, and other missiles, all turned topsy-turvy. Caskets thrown over, their contents spilled; in fact, everything in confusion.

Doubtless this confusion was the work of plunderers, but in the other chambers there had been a perfunctory attempt to restore order. The responsibility for this utter neglect would, therefore, seem to rest a good deal on the necropolis officials, who, in their task to put to rights the Antechamber, the Burial Chamber and the Innermost Treasury after the robbery, had neglected this little room altogether.