124 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

sphinxes has been half levelled by the fury of the Persian conquerors, and the colossal granite statue of Remeses, in the first court of the temple, now lies in enormous fragments around its pedestal. Mere dimensions give no idea of this immense mass, the weight of which, when entire, was nearly nine hundred tons. How poor and trifling appear the modern statues which we call colossal, when measured with this, one of whose toes is a yard in length; and how futile the appliances of modern art, when directed to its transportation for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles ! The architrave at each end of the court was upheld hy four caryatides, thirty feet in height.

Though much defaced they are still standing, but are dwarfed by the mighty limbs of Remeses. It is difficult to account for the means by which the colossus was broken. There are no marks of any instruments which could have forced such a mass asunder, and the only plausible conjecture I have heard is, that the stone must have been subjected to an intense heat and afterwards to the action of water. The statue, in its sitting position, must have been nearly sixty feet in height, and is the largest in the world, though not so high as the rock-hewn monoliths of Aboo-Simbel. The Turks and Arabs have cut several mill-stones out of its head, without any apparent dimi nution of its size.

The Memnonium differs from the other temples of Egypt in being almost faultless in its symmetry, even when measured by the strictest rules of art. I know of nothing so exquisite as the central colonnade of its grand hall — a double row of pillars, forty-five feet in height and twenty-three in circum ference, crowned with capitals resembling the bell-shaped blossoms of the lotus. One must see them to comprehend how