A long gallery opening at each end into a square chamber, now filled with rubbish (E), completes the plan.
Without any main door, without windows, and entered through a passage too long to admit the light of day, the building can only have received light and air through slanting air-slits in the roofing, of which traces are yet visible on the tops of the walls (_e, e_) on each side of the main hall (Note 10).

Inscriptions, bas-reliefs, paintings, such as we are accustomed to find everywhere in Egypt, are all wanting; and yet these bare walls produce as great an impression upon the spectator as the most richly decorated temples of Thebes.

Not only grandeur but sublimity has been achieved in the mere juxtaposition of blocks of granite and alabaster, by means of purity of line and exactness of proportion.
Some few scattered ruins in Nubia, the Fayum, and Sinai, do not suffice to prove whether the temples of the Twelfth Dynasty merited the praises lavished on them in contemporary inscriptions or not.

Those of the Theban kings, of the Ptolemies, and of the Caesars which are yet standing are in some cases nearly perfect, while almost all are easy of restoration to those who conscientiously study them upon the spot.

At first sight, they seem to present an infinite variety as to arrangement; but on a closer view they are found to conform to a single type.