CAIRO TO KISUMU Each arm from finger tips to elbow measures five yards, and the middle finger of each hand is a yard and a half long. As I stood beside the pedestal, with my feet on Gingerbread’s saddle, I could not reach the top.

These two colossal figures sit side by side on the edge of the Nile valley with the desert mountains at their backs. They were set up in honour of an Egyptian king who lived more than thirty-five centuries ago. The temple he con¬ structed behind them has now entirely disappeared. The statues overlook green fields, and as I gazed at the giant shapes I thought how they had watched the people sow¬ ing and reaping through all these centuries.

Not far from these monuments are the ruins of the temple of Rameses II, according to some authorities the Pharaoh who "would not let the people go.” Among them I saw the remains of a statue of that old king, once part of a structure at least sixty feet high. There is no granite nearer here than in the quarries of Aswan, so this mighty monu¬ ment must have been cut there and brought down the Nile to Thebes, a distance of one hundred and thirty-five miles.

Consider the obelisks which the Egyptians made at those quarries and carried down the Nile to Thebes, to Cairo, and to Alexandria. There are two of them still at this place. You may see them in the great Temple of Karnak, which is not more than a twenty-minute walk from Luxor. They weigh something like four hundred tons each, and if they were broken up and loaded upon wagons it would take one thousand six hundred horses to haul them. Each is a single block of granite, and each was carried in that shape to this place. There are in¬ scriptions on the Deir-el-Bahari Temple here which show that these two shafts were dug out of the quarries, covered 122