impressive building-on a scale worthy of its builder's (or appropriator's) opinion of himself. Its ruined pylon measures 220 feet across the face, and from the gate to the wall of the chambers behind the sanctuary the great structure measures over 520 feet. Thus it is about 7 feet longer than York Minster, and almost exactly the same length as Ely Cathedral; in breadth, of course, it more than doubles either of them. It originally consisted of three great halls preceding the sanctuary; but of the first practically nothing is left, and of the second only a few pillars of Osiride form. The third, or Hypostyle hall, is fairly preserved, and though not comparable to that of either Karnak or Luxor in point of size, is yet a noble chamber, with a nave of six pairs of open-flower columns, each 36 feet in height, and aisles with bud-columns of 25 feet. In the first hall stood the huge red granite sitting statue of the king, whose great fragments now strew the ground beside the Osiride pillars of the second court. With the possible exception of its standing brother colossus at Tanis, of which Petrie discovered the fragments in 1894, this is the largest block of stone which was ever handled by Egyptian stone workers, or indeed by any stoneworkers in the world. A few figures may help to give some idea of its monstrous greatness. The breadth of the shoulders was 223 feet, the length of the ear, 31⁄2 feet, that of the index-finger, 34 feet, while the breadth of the foot across the toes was 41⁄2 feet. The weight of the vast mass was probably close upon 1000 tons-a sufficiently mighty monument, one would think, to the vainglory of one man, not by any means in the first rank of Pharaohs except in his overweening consciousness of his own deserts. It is perhaps only poetic justice that the great usurper of other men's monuments should have had his own two greatest statues overthrown and smashed by later Pharaohs with a patient industry which has left them mere battered fragments; but we have thereby been robbed of the chance of seeing the vastest work of art, if these monstrous statues can be called works of art, ever wrought by the hands of man. The Ramesseum is adorned with reliefs of the battles of Ramses, including, of course, the Battle of Kadesh, which afforded an opportunity of glorifying the valour of the king, though indeed he should rather have been ashamed of the bad generalship which made the valour necessary. The reliefs of Ramses, however, here, and in most other places, are comparatively poor and coarse work, and not to be mentioned along with those of his father, Sety. North of the Ramesseum, in a great bay of the cliffs behind which lies the Biban-el-Moluk, is Der-el-Bahri, "The Convent of the North," so called because the Copts usurped part of the site for one of their monastic buildings, and along with it no small part of the materials of the two great temples which they found there. Of these, the larger and later, that of Queen Hatshepsut, was first made known to the scholars of Europe by MM. Jollois and Devilliers, two members of the French Expedition. Along with their description they gave a plan, fairly accurate in what it shows, though a great deal of the building was then hidden in the sand. They were followed by various explorers, chief of them Mariette, who succeeding in laying bare enough of the building to show how remarkable, and, as was then thought, unique a specimen of Egyptian architectural work it was. Finally the complete excavation of the temple was undertaken by the Egypt Exploration Fund, whose operations were directed in 1894 and subsequent years by M. Edouard Naville. The seven volumes of the Fund's Report on Der-el-Bahri with their superb plates, form one of the finest records of such work ever published, just as the temple with which they deal is itself the finest memoir ever published of a voyage of exploration. Hatshepsut has left on the walls of her temple an account of the inception of the expedition to Punt or Somaliland which preceded, and was the necessary condition of the founding of the temple. As in the case of the erection of her Karnak obelisks, she ascribes the beginning of the work to a direct divine inspiration. Amen himself, she says, commanded her, "to establish for him a Punt in his house, to plant the trees of God's Land beside his temple, in his garden," and to this end, "a command was heard from the great throne, an oracle of the god himself, that the ways to Punt should be searched out, that the highways to the Myrrh-terraces should be penetrated." In obedience to this divine behest, the queen got ready five ships of her fleet, and the little squadron found its way down the Red Sea, reaching it apparently by a canal from the Nile, as there is no record of transshipment of cargo, and finally arrived at the land which the Egyptians called God's Land, or the Divine Land, which was always to them a land of Romance, and from which they seem to have had some idea that their own ruling race had originally come. It may have been the country which we now know as Somaliland. Arrived at their destination, they amicably accomplished all that was desired in the way of trade with the natives, buying great heaps of the green gum which the Egyptians prized for the making of incense, numbers of the gumbearing trees themselves, ebony, ivory, gold-dust, apes, dogs, panther-skins, and even some of the natives and their children. "Never," says the inscription, "was brought the like of this for any king who has been since the beginning.” The return voyage was safely accomplished, and the voyagers had a gala reception at Thebes, with a guard of honour of soldiers to meet them, while the treasures which they had brought were measured and carefully stored in the treasurehouse of Amen. Meanwhile the temple had been preparing, and when at last all was completed, the incense-gum duly offered to Amen, and the incense-trees planted on the terraces of his new and beautiful house, the queen proudly records her satisfaction at the completion of the great work, "I have made for him a Punt in his garden, just as he commanded me, for Thebes. It is large enough for him to walk abroad in." The great temple on whose walls the whole story of the expedition is portrayed in a series of the finest reliefs which Egyptian art ever produced, is itself a sufficiently remarkable building. It was planned by Hatshepsut's famous architect and vizier, Senmut, and while deriving, as we |