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border of the Libyan Desert. Doctor Bronson told us while we were riding along that this was formerly the Libyan suburb of Thebes, and that the ancient city stood on both sides of the river. Sir Gardner Wilkinson says it was about five miles long by three in width. It was in its most flourishing condition during the eighteenth dynasty, and it began to decline in the eighth century before the Christian era. There is a great deal of dispute as to its population; but it is said that it could send out twenty thousand horsemen to battle, and its walls were pierced with a hundred gates. Its ruins are scattered over a large area, and its burialgrounds are so enormous that several days would be required for even a slight examination of them.

"According to some writers the greater part of the population was on the eastern or Luxor side, while the western section was the residence of the kings and royal households; and, consequently, many of the temples were built there. For the same reason the tombs of the kings were on the western side, but were placed a considerable distance from the river, where the character of the limestone rock was such that it could be readily excavated. Much of the site of the city is now overflowed every year

at the time of the inundation, and in this portion there are only a few traces of the buildings that once stood there.

"We went through some of the small temples, and then came to the Rameseum, or Memnonium. It owes its first name to the fact that it was founded by Rameses the Great, and its second to its dedication to the worship of Memnon. It is grand enough to have half a dozen names instead of two, and the honor can certainly be divided between Rameses and Memnon without any fear that either of them will suffer.

"It was in the usual form of the Egyptian temples, and its grand court was not far from fifty yards square. Many of the columns have disappeared, or lie in ruins, but enough of them remain to show the magnificence of the original structure.

"The great object of curiosity here is the statue of Rameses the Great,

which stood in the courtyard, and is now overturned and broken. There are some mysteries about it, and we will try to name them.

"In the first place, no one can guess how the Egyptians managed to take such a huge block of granite from the quarries and convert it into a statue. It was a single piece of stone, and represented the King sitting on his throne (the usual position of Egyptian statues) with his hands resting on his knees,

and his face in that calm repose that a great ruler ought to exhibit when he has everything his own way. And how large do you suppose it was?

"We used a tape-line to be sure we were right in our estimates, and found that the figure was twenty feet across the shoulders and fifteen feet from shoulder to elbow. The foot was eleven feet from toe to heel, and the other parts of the statue were in proportion. The throne and legs are a good deal broken up, but the upper part of the statue down to the waist is in comparatively good condition. Engineers have calculated that the whole statue, when perfect, weighed nearly nine hundred tons, or nearly three times as much as the largest obelisk at Karnak. Commander Gorringe says that the obelisk he transported from Egypt to America, and set up in Central Park, New York, weighs two hundred and twenty-four tons, so you see what a big thing was this statue of Rameses,. which the Egyptians brought down the river from Assouan and set up in Thebes thousands of years ago.

"When the Persians conquered Egypt, and destroyed many of its cities, they overturned the statue of Rameses the Great, and proceeded to break it up; and another of the mysteries is how they managed to break it, as gunpowder was not then invented, and there is nothing to show

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that they possessed any powerful explosives. But break it they did; and it is only because it was so large, or they were called away on other business, that they left any part of it for us to open our eyes about.

"If possessing the largest statue ever known in ancient or modern times makes one happy, Rameses ought to have been as jolly as he was great. But perhaps he did not enjoy himself much, after all, as he seems to have been a cruel tyrant, who oppressed his people, and compelled his prisoners of war to build the temples that remain to mark his greatness. The inscriptions around this and other temples show him to have been

full of cruelty: he sacrificed prisoners with his own hand, or caused them to be put to death in his presence; and there is one picture wherein he is putting out the eyes of several captives, who are held by cords passed through their nostrils. On the whole, though we should have liked to look upon Rameses in his great temple, we are not at all sorry that he belonged to an age long past. If he was a good man for his time, it was certainly not a good time to live in.

"We have wished ever so much that we could read the inscriptions on the walls of the temple; but, after all, we need not feel so badly that

we cannot do so, because many learned men have made translations for us. The pictures tell us a great deal, even without the hieroglyphics; they make it certain that the King was the most important personage at the time he lived, and if we believed what they represent, we should conclude that he did all the fighting, and his army only stood and looked on.

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THE PHALANX OF THE SHETA.

One picture shows him sending a shower of arrows among the enemy and putting them to flight; and in another he is pulling down the walls of a fort, as though it was nothing but a toy house built of corn-cobs.

"There is a picture which is called 'The Phalanx of the Sheta,' which we could not make much of till it was explained to us, and then we saw there was a good deal in it. We enclose a drawing of it, so that you can see how the Egyptians represented things on a plain surface without perspective.

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"The phalanx is represented as a reserve corps close by a fortified town, which is surrounded by double ditches for protection against an enemy. On each side of the town there is a bridge over the ditches, and there are men in the towers of the fort, as if they were expecting to be attacked. The soldiers in the phalanx are armed with short swords or knives, and with spears. Doctor Bronson says the swords have a very close resemblance to the famous bowie-knife of the South-western States of North America, and it is possible that the inventor of that weapon got his idea from the ancient Egyptians. Only the front and rear ranks have weapons, and what the men in the middle are holding out their hands for we cannot guess.

"We stayed at the Rameseum as long as possible, and would gladly have ignored the whistle of the conductor summoning us to move on,

had we not feared missing other important sights. We went next to the Temple of Medinet Aboo, or rather to the temples, as there are two of them together, one much smaller than the other. The small temple was the work of several kings, and some of the later ones altered the plans of their predecessors, so that the architecture is not altogether harmonious.