Profile of the emission in the RASS R4, R5, and R6 bands taken from the box shown in the previous figure. In each case the lowest emission level of the profile was removed and the resulting profile was normalized so that the emission in its brightest part (the NPS) was set to unity. The black histogram shows the expected absorption profile. The perpendiculars show the extent over which we obtained the XMM-Newton data. The bars in the upper right show the typical uncertainty of the ROSAT data in each band where the absorption changes most strongly.