In a darkened recess, behind a stream of honey-yellow light that falls like a libation on the square grey altar, stands a low glass case. Peering in, I find a jumble of old bones and fragments of bone. There is something disturbingly inhuman about them.
An echo of footsteps and voices.
I retreat into an adjoining passageway, and find myself in a vast, vaulted chamber perforated with loculi – little niches for the bodies of the dead.
'And this,' says a voice, drawing nearer, 'is Caracalla Hall.'
'And what is a "Corolla"?' queries the other, in a distinctly American drawl.
'Caracalla? He was Roman Emperor.'
I move round to the entrance of the passageway in order to eavesdrop better, and learn that the small display case is a mini-equine ossuary, filled with the mortal remains of favoured race horses laid here to rest in the necropolis of Kom el-Shoqafa as a mark of honour. (An honour presumably denied to the donkey whose disappearance down an excavation shaft led to the rediscovery of the old catacombs.)
Squeezing out again into the rotunda, past the triclinium where they would have feasted in memory of the dead (did they eat horse meat, I wonder?), I find the entrance to the main burial chamber. Here, beneath a huge scallop shell carved into the rock, are steps which descend to what appears to be the entrance to a Greek temple. The façade, however, is surmounted by an Egyptian winged sun-disc and flanked by crowned cobras, bodies twisted into pretzel knots: an intriguing mix of Egyptian and Graeco-Roman elements. A strange touch of the sublime in the midst of this stony, silent, subterranean world of sepulchral shadows.
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