their blind greed have destroyed the upper portions,[*] and its ruins,
protected and cleared as they are to-day, rise only some ten or twelve
feet from the ground. In the bas-reliefs the majority of the figures
have only legs and a portion of the body; their heads and shoulders have
disappeared with the upper parts of the walls. But they seem to have
preserved their vitality: the gesticulations, the exaggerated pantomime
of the attitudes of these headless things, are more strange, more
striking, perhaps, than if their faces still remained. And they have
preserved too, in an extraordinary degree, the brightness of their
antique paintings, the fresh tints of their costumes, of their robes of
turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, or golden-yellow. It is an
artless kind of fresco-work, which nevertheless amazes us by remaining
perfect after thirty-five centuries. All that these people did seems
as if made for immortality. It is true, however, that such brilliant
colours are not found in any of the other Pharaonic monuments, and that
here they are heightened by the white background. For, notwithstanding
the bluish, black and red granite of the porticoes, the walls are all of
a fine limestone, of exceeding whiteness, and, in the holy of holies, of
a pure alabaster.

[*] Not long ago a manufacturer, established in the
neighbourhood, discovering that the limestone of its walls
was friable, used this temple as a quarry, and for some
years bas-reliefs beyond price served as aliment to the
mills of the factory.

Above the truncated walls, with their bright clear colours, the desert
appears, and shows quite brown by contrast; one sees the great yellow
swell of sand and stones above the pictures of these decapitated people.
It rises like a colossal wave and stretches out to bathe the foot of the