"
When one has been sufficiently dis-Europized by remote travel, to
become, as to his imagination, a child again, and receive a child's
impressions from the strangeness that surrounds him, the grotesque and
fantastic aspects of his situation afford him the same emotions, of
unquestioning wonder and romantic sympathy, that he derived in the old
time from the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor, the exploits of Jack the
Giant-Killer, what Gulliver saw, or Munchausen did. Behold Belzoni in
the necropolis of Thebes, crawling on his very face among the dusty
rubbish of unnumbered mummies, to steal papyri from their bosoms.
Fatigued with the exertion of squirming through a mummy-choked passage
of five hundred yards, he sought a resting-place; but when he would
have sat down, his weight bore on the body of an Egyptian, and crushed
it like a bandbox. He naturally had recourse to his hands to sustain
his weight; but they found no better support, and he sunk altogether in
a crash of broken bones, rags, and wooden cases, that raised such a
dust as kept him motionless for a quarter of an hour, waiting for it to
subside.
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