n every possible form and
attitude--human-legged, human-headed, crowned, entwining mummies,
enwreathing or embraced by processions, extending down whole galleries,
so that meeting the head of a serpent at the top of a staircase, you
have to descend to its very end before you reach his tail. At last you
arrive at the close of all--the vaulted hall, in the centre of which
lies the immense alabaster sarcophagus, which ought to contain the body
of the king. Here the processions, above, below, and around, reach their
highest pitch--meandering round and round--white, and black, and red,
and blue--legs and arms and wings spreading in enormous forms over the
ceilings; and below lies the sarcophagus itself."[25]

The greatest of the works of Ramesses are of a different description,
and are indicative of that inordinate vanity which is the leading
feature of his character. They are colossal images of himself. Four of
these, each seventy feet in height, form the facade of the marvellous
rock-temple of Ipsambul--"the finest of its class known to exist
anywhere"--and constitute one of the most impressive sights which the
world has to offer. There stands the Great King, four times repeated,
silent, majestic, superhuman--with features marked by profound repose
and tranquillity, touched perhaps with a little scorn, looking out
eternally on the grey-white Nubian waste, which stretches far away to a
dim and distant horizon. Here, as you sit on the deep pure sand, you
seem to see the monarch, who did so much, who reigned so long, who
covered, not only Egypt, but Nubia and Ethiopia with his memorials. "You
can look at his features inch by inch, see them not only magnified to
tenfold their original size, so that ear and mouth and nose, and every
link of his collar, and every line of his skin, sinks into you with the
weight of a mountain; but those features are repeated exactly the same
three times over--four times they once were, but the upper part of the
fourth statue is gone. Look at them as they emerge--the two northern
figures--from the sand which reaches up to their throats; the
southernmost, as he sits unbroken, and revealed from the top of his
royal helmet to the toe of his enormous foot"[26] Look at them, and
remember that you have here portrait-statues of one of the greatest of
the kings of the Old World, of the world that was "old" when Greece and
Rome were either unborn or in their swaddling clothes; portrait-statues,
moreover, o