And the couples slowly advanced, their chins raised, their eyes blinking, between the gigantic stone figures, the black marble gods, dumb in their hieratic rigidity, and the monstrous beasts, half cats and half women, with death-like faces, attenuated noses, and swollen lips.

They thought all these things very ugly.

The stone carvings of the present day were a great deal better.

An inscription in Phoenician characters amazed them.

No one could possibly have ever read that scrawl.