The pylon itself is gigantic. The breadth of the west front of St. Paul’s, the greatest building familiar to English minds, is 179 feet, and its height, to the top of the statue of St. Paul on the pediment, is 135 feet. The Pylon of the Ptolemies measures 370 feet in breadth, or rather more than double St. Paul’s, while its height is 142½ feet, so that it overtops St. Paul’s head by 7½ feet. In addition its walls are 49 feet thick. No mightier approach to a temple was ever devised. Passing through this great gateway we find ourselves in an open court whose dimensions are worthy of the portal which gave access to it. From the gateway where you stand to the scarcely less imposing pylon of Ramses I, which faces you across the open space, this court measures 275 feet, while its breadth is 338 feet. The area of St. Paul’s is 84,000 square feet, so that this single court of Karnak exceeds our great cathedral in area by 8000 square feet. Around its walls runs a colonnade of single columns. In the north corner of the court there stands a little grey sandstone temple, divided into three chapels, which are dedicated to Amen, Mut, and Khonsu, the members of the Theban Triad. The southern colonnade is broken by the intruding front of a larger temple. This is the temple of Ramses III, the last of the great warrior kings of Egypt, who saved the land, in the degenerate days of the XXth Dynasty, from being overrun and ravaged by the raid of the Sea-Peoples. His temple, though very modest in size (it measures only 170 feet in length), is important as giving one of the most perfect examples extant of a complete Egyptian temple, built from start to finish by one monarch, and on a straightforward and homogeneous plan. The great court which has taken these two lesser buildings into its sweep was the work of the Libyan Pharaohs of the XXIInd Dynasty, who held their court at Bubastis, and is therefore often called the Court of the Bubastites. The temple of Ramses III was cleared of rubbish in 1896–7 by M. Legrain, in the course of his great work at Karnak. Down the central avenue of the Bubastite court the Ethiopian Pharaohs of the XXVth Dynasty began the erection of a colonnade whose purpose has not been quite determined. As they left it, it consisted of a double range of huge columns, five in each row. Of the ten, only one solitary survivor now stands, and is known as the Column of Taharqa, after the Ethiopian king who was responsible for its erection, and for some of the sorest disasters of Egypt in her declining days. It was Taharqa and his successor Tanutamen who brought down upon Egypt the wrath of the Assyrian conqueror, Ashurbanipal, whose ruthless soldiery by the sack of Thebes dealt the imperial city a blow from which she never recovered. Taharqa’s column stands as the memorial of a man who “began to build, and was not able to finish” in more senses than one.