AT THEBES IN THE TEMPLE OF THE OGRESS This evening, in the vast chaos of ruins--at the hour in which the light of the sun begins to turn to rose--I make my way along one of the magnificent roads of the town-mummy, that, in fact, which goes off at a right angle to the line of the temples of Amen, and, losing itself more or less in the sands, leads at length to a sacred lake on the border of which certain cat-headed goddesses are seated in state watching the dead water and the expanse of the desert.

This particular road was begun three thousand four hundred years ago by a beautiful queen called Makeri,[*] and in the following centuries a number of kings continued its construction.

It was ornamented with pylons of a superb massiveness--pylons are monumental walls, in the form of a trapezium with a wide base, covered entirely with hieroglyphs, which the Egyptians used to place at either side of their porticoes and long avenues--as well as by colossal statues and interminable rows of rams, larger than buffaloes, crouched on pedestals.
[*] To-day the mummy with the baby in the museum at Cairo.
At the first pylons I have to make a detour.

They are so ruinous that their blocks, fallen down on all sides, have closed the passage.

Here used to watch, on right and left, two upright giants of red granite from Syene.