It Is True, However, That Such Brilliant Colours Are Not Found In Any Of The Other Pharaonic Monuments, And That

Here they are heightened by the white background. For, notwithstanding the bluish, black and red granite of the porticoes, the

Walls are all of a fine limestone, of exceeding whiteness, and, in the holy of holies, of a pure alabaster.

[*] Not long ago a manufacturer, established in the neighbourhood, discovering that the limestone of its walls was friable, used this temple as a quarry, and for some years bas-reliefs beyond price served as aliment to the mills of the factory.

Above the truncated walls, with their bright clear colours, the desert appears, and shows quite brown by contrast; one sees the great yellow swell of sand and stones above the pictures of these decapitated people. It rises like a colossal wave and stretches out to bathe the foot of the Libyan mountains beyond. Towards the north and west of the solitudes, shapeless ruins of tawny-coloured blocks follow one another in the sands until the dazzling distance ends in a clear-cut line against the sky. Apart from this temple of Ramses, where we now stand, and that of Seti in the vicinity, where the enterprise of Thomas Cook & Son flourishes, there is nothing around us but ruins, crumbled and pulverised beyond all possible redemption. But they give us pause, these disappearing ruins, for they are the debris of that ageless temple, where sleeps the head of the god, the debris of the tombs of the Middle and Ancient Empires, and they indicate still the wide extent and development of the necropoles of Abydos, so old that it almost makes one giddy to think of their beginning.

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