158 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

one place Isis is seen giving suck to the infant god — a group which bore a singular resemblance to some painting I haye seen of the Virgin and Child. The gods are here painted of fair, Greek complexion, and not, as in the oldest tombs and temples, of a light red. Their profiles are symmetrical and even beautiful, and the emblems by "which they are surrounded, are drawn and colored in admirable taste. Those friends of the African Race, who point to Egypt as a proof of what that race has accomplished, are wholly mistake. The only negro features represented in Egyptian sculpture are those of slaves and captives taken in the Ethiopian wars of the Pharaohs. The temples and pyramids throughout Nubia, as far as the frontiers of Dar-Fur and Abyssinia, all bear the hieroglyphs of these monarchs, and there is no evidence in all the valley of the Nile that the Negro Race ever attained a higher degree of civilization than is at present exhibited in Congo and Ashantee.

East of the great temple is a square, open building, whose four sides are rows of columns, supporting an architrave, and united, at about half their height, by screens of stone. The capitals are all of different design, yet exhibit the same exquisite harmony which charmed us in Hermontis and Esneh.

The screens and pillars were evidently intended to have been covered with sculpture, and a roof of sandstone blocks was to have been added, which would have made the structure as perfect as it is unique. The square block, or abacus, interposed between the capital and architrave, is even higher than in the pillars of Hermontis, and I was equally puzzled whether to all it a grace or a defect. There was one thing, however, which certainly did give a grace to the building, and that was