glyphic inscriptions without end, were glanced at, passed by, and succeeded by fresh wonders. I dare not say how many small outlying temples we saw in the course of that rapid survey. In one place we came upon an undulating tract of coarse halfeh grass, in the midst of which, battered, defaced, forlorn, sat a weird company of green granite Sphinxes and lioness-headed Basts. In another, we saw a magnificent colossal hawk upright on his pedestal in the midst of a bergfall of ruins. More avenues of Sphinxes, more pylons, more colossi, were passed before the road we took in returning brought us round to that by which we had come. By the time we reached the Sheykh's tomb, it was nearly dusk. We rode back across the plain, silent and bewildered. Have I not said that it was like a dream?
1 Arabic "kharûf," pronounced "haroof" – English, sheep.
2 This famous building is supposed by some to be identical both with the Memnonium of Strabo and the Tomb of Osymandias as described by Diodorus Siculus. Champollion, however, following the sense of the hieroglyphed legends, in which it is styled "The House of Rameses" (the Second), has given to it the more appropriate name of the Ramesseum.
3 Translated into French by the late Vicomte de Rougé under the title of Le Poëme de Pentaour, 1856 ; into English by Mr. Goodwin, 1858 ; and again by Professor Lushington in 1874. See Records of the Past, vol. ii.
4 According to the great inscription of Abydos translated by Professor Maspero, Rameses II would seem to have been in some sense King from his birth, as if the throne of Egypt came to him through his mother, and as if his father, Seti I, had reigned for him during his infancy as King-Regent. Some inscriptions, indeed, show him to have received homage even before his birth.
5 The ruins of the Great Temple of Luxor have undergone a complete transformation since the above description was written ; Professor Maspero, during the two last years of his official rule as successor to the late Mariette-Pasha, having done for this magnificent relic of Pharaonic times what his predecessor did for the more recent Temple of Edfoo. The difficulties of carrying out this great undertaking were so great as to appear at first sight almost insurmountable. The fellaheen refused at first to sell their houses ; Mustapha Aga asked the exorbitant price of £3000 for his Consular residence, built as it was between the columns of Horemheb facing the river ; and for no pecuniary consideration whatever was it possible to purchase the right of pulling down the mosque in the first great courtyard of the Temple. After twelve months of negotiation, the fellaheen were at last bought out on fair terms, each proprietor receiving a stated price for his dwelling and a piece of land elsewhere, upon which to build another. Some thirty families were thus got rid of, about eight or ten only refusing to leave at any price. The work of demolition was begun in 1885. In 1886, the few families yet lingering in the ruins followed the example of the rest ; and in the course of that season the Temple was cleared from end to end, only the little native mosque being left standing within the precincts, and Mustapha Aga's house on the side next the landing-place. Professor Maspero's resignation followed in 1887, since when the work has been carried on by his successor, M. Grébaut, with the result that in place of a crowded, sordid, unintelligible labyrinth of mud-huts, yards, stables, alleys, and dung-heaps, a noble Temple, second only to that of Karnak for grandeur of design and beauty of proportion, now marshals its avenues of columns and uplifts its sculptured architraves along the crest of the ridge which here rises above the eastern bank of the Nile. Some of those columns, now that they are cleared down to the level of the original pavement, measure 57 feet in the shaft ; and in the great courtyard built by Rameses II, which measures 190 feet by 170, a series of beautiful colossal statues of that Pharaoh in highly polished red granite have been discovered, some yet standing in situ, having