Several Broad Steps Lead Up To The Entrance, And In Front Of All Is A Colonnade Of Four Columns, Standing Between Two Pilasters.

On each of the three sides of the great chamber is an apartment for the reception of the dead.

A similar excavation, but larger, opens into each end of the vestibule, the length of which latter is not equal to

[p.425] that of the colonnade as it appears in front, but terminates at either end between the pilaster and the neighbouring column. The doors of the two apartments opening into the vestibule are covered with carvings richer and more beautiful than those on the door of the principal chamber. The colonnade is about thirty-five feet high, and the columns are about three feet in diameter with Corinthian capitals. The pilasters at the two extremities of the colonnade, and the two columns nearest to them, are formed out of the solid rock, like all the rest of the monument, but the two centre columns, one of which has fallen, were constructed separately, and were composed of three pieces each. The colonnade is crowned with a pediment, above which are other ornaments, which, if I distinguished them correctly, consisted of an insulated cylinder crowned with a vase, standing between two other structures in the shape of small temples, supported by short pillars. The entire front, from the base of the columns to the top of the ornaments, may be sixty or sixty-five feet. The architrave of the colonnade is adorned with vases, connected together with festoons. The exterior wall of the chamber at each end of the vestibule, which presents itself to the front between the pilaster and the neighbouring column, was ornamented with colossal figures in bas-relief; but I could not make out what they represented. One of them appears to have been a female mounted upon an animal, which, from the tail and hind leg, appears to have been a camel. All the other ornaments sculptured on the monument are in perfect preservation.

The natives call this monument Kaszr Faraoun (Arabic), or Pharaoh’s castle; and pretend that it was the residence of a prince. But it was rather the sepulchre of a prince, and great must have been the opulence of a city, which could dedicate such monuments to the memory of its rulers.

[p.426] From this place, as I before observed, the Syk widens, and the road continues for a few hundred paces lower down through a spacious passage between the two cliffs. Several very large sepulchres are excavated in the rocks on both sides; they consist generally of a single lofty apartment with a flat roof; some of them are larger than the principal chamber in the Kaszr Faraoun. Of those which I entered, the walls were quite plain and unornamented; in some of them are small side rooms, with excavations and recesses in the rock for the reception of the dead; in others I found the floor itself irregularly excavated for the same purpose, in compartments six to eight feet deep, and of the shape of a coffin; in the floor of one sepulchre I counted as many as twelve cavities of this kind, besides a deep niche in the wall, where the bodies of the principal members of the family, to whom the sepulchre belonged, were probably deposited.

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