Let us turn, then, to Karnak, and try to see a little of what modern work has done in the direction of making this vastest of extant Egyptian temples intelligible. A century ago, Belzoni wandered round the ruins of the great temple, his mind filled with vague dreams of Memnon, Osymandias, and Psammethes, perhaps as appreciative of the wonder of what he saw as the most enlightened of his successors, but absolutely in the dark as to the significance of what he saw, or the history of how the great building had been reared; to-day the story of Karnak is practically as well understood as that of one of our European cathedrals, and anyone who likes to take the trouble may trace out the evidence of its age-long growth. Indeed it is difficult for the modern to realise how lengthy is the story which unfolds itself in the sculptured stones of the great temple. We think with something like awe of the long process which reared some of our cathedrals, and which may, perhaps, have lasted for a century, or perhaps, in an extreme case, for two; but Karnak was a growing organism for a period of time more than twice as long, not only as any of our cathedrals took in the building, but twice as long as any of them have been standing. Towards the eastern end of the vast complex of Karnak there are still to be seen the scanty relics of the earliest builders of the temple of whom we have any knowledge--the Middle Kingdom Pharaohs, who began their work at Karnak certainly not much later than 2000 B.C. On the western face of the great temple is the Pylon of the Ptolemies, whose dynasty only closed with the subjection of Egypt to Roman rule in 30 B.C. Karnak, in other words, was building for a period which was certainly not less than seventeen hundred years, and which may have been almost two thousand! Such a consideration makes our ideas as to duration seem very small indeed. Nor has the work been less complicated than it has been lengthy. Practically every Pharaoh worth naming has left his mark on the great building in some form or another, and often the work of the reigning king was done without the slightest regard to that of his forerunners; sometimes, indeed, with the deliberate design of obscuring it and blotting out its memory. Consequently the task of disentangling the story of Karnak has been no easy one. It has been like the reading of a manuscript where interpolations of different writers, dealing with different matters, continually break the thread of the main narrative, and where, to add to the confusion, part of the writing is a palimpsest, written over the faded script of an earlier author. Along with the difficulty of interpreting the story of the various buildings has gone that of preserving them from destruction.