There have been no marvels of buried treasure to gild the pages of the story of excavation at Der el-Bahri; but there has been a solid addition to the sum of human knowledge of the past. At a score of other sites, work similar to that which has just been described has been continually going on during the last thirty years. Mariette’s beginnings of clearance at sites such as Edfu, Esneh, Denderah, and Abydos have been followed by work whose thoroughness has been such as Mariette, from the nature of the case, could never have accomplished. To tell the story of excavation, even in the most meagre outline, would take a volume instead of a chapter, and Der el-Bahri must suffice as a typical example of the kind of work which has been done all up and down the land of Egypt. Reference must be made, however, to one piece of work, associated, curiously enough, also with the name of the explorer of Der el-Bahri, which has a unique interest of its own. This is the discovery of the Pool of Osiris, which, as Strabo told us, lay beneath the great temple, or, as he called it, the Memnonium, at Abydos. In 1914 M. Naville, following up the work of Miss M. A. Murray and Professor Petrie in 1902–3, found a great underground chamber, 100 feet by 60 feet, constructed of huge blocks of limestone, cased inside with hard red sandstone. The pillars, the architraves, and the roofing-blocks of the aisles of this chamber were all of fine granite, without adornment or inscription, and in fact resembled almost exactly the similar work in the so-called “Temple of the Sphinx” at Gizeh, with this difference, that whereas the granite pillars of the Temple of the Sphinx are 3 feet square, those of the chamber at Abydos are 8½ feet square. The wonder of the building, however, was its arrangement. In the centre of the chamber stood two rows of these great granite monoliths, each row consisting of five pillars. Around the central block of masonry on which these pillars rested, ran a deep channel, which had manifestly once been filled with water, so as to render the central block an island. Around this channel runs a ledge of stonework about 3 feet wide, and from this ledge access is given to a set of seventeen cells each about 6 feet square and 6 feet high. Manifestly this extraordinary building is Strabo’s “well,” which, as he tells us, was below the temple, and was built like the Labyrinth, only on a smaller scale, with passages covered by a single stone. What may have been its use it is as yet impossible to say. The water channel and the ledge round it suggest that the boat of Osiris may have been towed around the pool by his priests on the great feast-days, or when the Passion Play of Abydos, representing the death and resurrection of Osiris, was being celebrated. Two things alone seem certain, the first, the identity of the chamber with the pool described by the old geographer, and the second, that we have here one of the most ancient sacred buildings in Egypt.