The site is one which offers peculiar advantages, but is also encompassed with peculiar risks. No more magnificent background for a building could be desired; but the background is precisely of such magnificence as to form a dangerous pitfall in which a merely mediocre architect would have been lost. To attempt to compete with Nature, when the work of man has to be placed in such close proximity with her towering architecture, would be to ensure hopeless defeat and to invite ridicule. Khufu’s mountain of stone gets its full value from contrast with the long lines of the desert plateau on whose edge it stands. The columns and obelisks of Karnak and Luxor are far enough from the hills on either bank of the Nile to make the human handiwork the central and impressive feature of the picture; but the site at Der el-Bahri would have made what was possible elsewhere a mere derision. To have placed the huge columns which seem so great on the Theban plain in competition with the soaring vertical lines of the Libyan cliffs would have been to place a fool’s cap on the most grandiose work of human hands. What was needed at Der el-Bahri was a building which should avoid the very idea of rivalry with Nature’s handiwork, and which should conquer by subjection, a building where all the emphasis should be laid on the horizontal lines of structure, so as to disclaim at once the thought of competition with the towering buttresses and bastions behind. It may be questioned if ever an architect more thoroughly appreciated the conditions of his problem, or more satisfactorily fulfilled them, than did Senmut, when he designed for Queen Hatshepsut the three rising courts of the Paradise of Amen, with the long slopes leading from the one to the other, and the stately colonnades, where the shadows are so cunningly pressed into the decorative scheme, and the vertical lines of the columns give emphasis to the horizontality of the whole conception, and never for one moment suggest rivalry with the cliffs above.