esented female musicians and dancers, women bathing,
flooded with perfumes and massaged by slaves,--the poses so elegant, the
forms so youthfully suave, and the outlines so pure, that no art has
ever surpassed them.

Rich and complicated ornamental designs, admirably carried out in
harmonious green, blue, red, yellow, and white, covered the spaces left
empty. On cartouches and bands in the shape of stelae were inscribed the
titles of the Pharaoh and inscriptions in his honour.

On the shafts of the huge columns were decorative or symbolical figures
wearing the pschent, armed with the tau, following each other in
procession, and whose eyes, showing full upon a side face, seemed to
look inquisitively into the hall. Lines of perpendicular hieroglyphs
separated the zones of personages. Among the green leaves carved on the
drum of the capital, buds and lotus flowers stood out in their natural
colours, imitating baskets of bloom.

Between each pair of columns an elegant table of cedar bore on its
platform a bronze cup filled with scented oil, from which the cotton
wicks drew an odoriferous light. Groups of tall vases, bound together
with wreaths, alternated with the lamps and held at the foot of each
pillar sheaves of golden grain mingled with field grasses and balsamic
plants.

In the centre of the hall a round porphyry table, the disc of which was
supported by the statue of a captive, disappeared under heaped-up urns,
vases, flagons, and pots, whence rose a forest of gigantic artificial
flowers; for real flowers would have appeared mean in the centre of that
vast hall, and nature had to be proportioned to the mighty work of man.
These enormous calyxes were of the most brilliant golden yellow, azure,
and purple.

At the back rose the throne, or chair, of the Pharaoh, the feet of
which, curiously crossed and bound by encircling ribbing, had in their
re-entering angles four statuettes of barbaric Asiatic or African
prisoners recognisable by their beards and their dress. These figures,
their elbows tied behind their backs, and kneeling in constrained
attitudes, their bodies bowed, bore upon their humbled heads the
cushion, checkered with gold, red, and black, on which sat their
conqueror. Faces of chimerical animals from whose mouths fell, instead
of a tongue, a long red tuft, adorned the crossbars of the throne.

On either side of it were ranged, for the princes, less splendid, though
still extremely elegant and charmin