Leaving the court for a moment by the portal in the south-east corner, we find on the wall of the second pylon one of the most interesting records of the temple. This is the inscription in which Sheshanq, one of the Libyan Pharaohs, records the triumph of that campaign in Syria in the course of which he humbled the pride of Rehoboam of Judah, and robbed Solomon’s temple of all the riches which the wise king had accumulated. In Sheshanq’s relief a gigantic figure of Amen leads up before the now vanished figure of the king five rows of captive towns of Palestine, each represented by a circular wall enclosing its name, from which emerges the upper part of a bound prisoner. [Illustration: 13. KARNAK, NAVE OF HYPOSTYLE HALL.] Before us, as we return to the great court, rises the second pylon, the work of Ramses I, the founder of the XIXth Dynasty. Scarcely any part of the temple is more eloquent of the jumble of times, and kings, and even faiths, which goes to make up Karnak, than the neighbourhood of this pylon. The great gateway itself is of Ramses I; but its materials had their own story before he built them into his new approach to the temple of Amen, and had served another god; for some of the blocks of the pylon once belonged to one of the heretical temples of Akhenaten, and bear his name and those of his successors, Tutankhamen and Ay. The little vestibule before the pylon is flanked by statues of Ramses II; but within the doorway are found the cartouches of Ramses I and Sety II, as well as that of Ramses II, while part of the vestibule is the work of two of the Ptolemies. Thus in this little space the work of no fewer than eight Pharaohs, covering a period of more than a thousand years, is represented. The gateway of Ramses I gives access to what is perhaps the most remarkable, though by no means the most beautiful, of the halls of Karnak. The Hypostyle Hall, one of the hugest of human creations, was, like so much else at Karnak, the work of several sovereigns, though in this case the completion of the building was not so very long protracted as in some other instances. The hall was begun by Ramses I, whose short reign of two years only enabled him to see the work started. The greater part of the hall as we now see it is the work of Sety I, one of the finest of Egyptian Pharaohs, whose work everywhere is in accordance with the nobility of his face as it can be seen at Cairo.