Lying in wait behind Anubis is a monster, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus. This terror will eat the heart of Ani if it is found corrupt. At last he is declared justified. Thoth, the ibis-headed God of Writing, records the verdict on his tablet. The justified Ani moves on past the baffled devourer, with the mystic presence of his little wife rejoicing at his side. They go to the awful court of Osiris. She makes sacrifice with him there. The God of the Dead is indeed a strange deity, a seated semi-animated mummy, with all the appurtenances of royalty, and with the four sons of Horus on a lotus before him, and his two wives, Isis and Nephthys, standing behind his throne with their hands on his shoulders.
The justified soul now boards the boat in which the sun rides as it journeys through the night. He rises a glorious boatman in the morning, working an oar to speed the craft through the high ocean of the noon sky. Henceforth he makes the eternal round with the sun. Therefore in Ancient Egypt the roll was called, not the Book of the Dead, but _The Chapters on Coming Forth by Day_.
This book on motion pictures does not profess to be an expert treatise on Egyptology as well. The learned folk are welcome to amend the modernisms that have crept into it. But the fact remains that something like this story in one form or another held Egypt spell-bound for many hundred years. It was the force behind every mummification. It was the reason for the whole Egyptian system of life, death, and entombment, for the man not embalmed could not make the journey. So the explorer finds the Egyptian with a roll of this papyrus as a guide-book on his mummy breast. The soul needed to return for refreshment periodically to the stone chamber, and the mummy mutilated or destroyed could not entertain the guest. Egypt cried out through thousands of years for the ultimate resurrection of the whole man, his _coming forth by day_.
We need not fear that a story that so dominated a race will be lost on modern souls when vividly set forth. Is it too much to expect that some American prophet-wizard of the future will give us this film in the spirit of an Egyptian priest?
The Greeks, the wisest people in our limited system of classics, bowed down before the Egyptian hierarchy. That cult must have had a fine personal authority and glamour to master such men. The unseen mysteries were always on the Egyptian heart as a burden and a consolation, and though there may have been jugglers in the outer courts of these temples, as there have been in the courts of all temples, no mere actor could make an Egyptian priest of himself. Their very alphabet has a regal enchantment in its lines, and the same æsthetic-mystical power remains in their pylons and images under the blaze of the all-revealing noonday sun.