With the single exception of the stone, the work of her deadly enemy Thothmes III, which now stands before St. John Lateran in Rome, and which is 8 feet higher than its rival, the shaft of Hatshepsut, which still remains erect at Karnak, is the largest obelisk existing, and is more than 20 feet higher than the so-called “Cleopatra’s Needle,” which represents to Londoners, as its twin does to the folk of New York, the skill of ancient Egypt. [Illustration: 15. KARNAK, VIEW FROM THE NORTH, OBELISKS OF HATSHEPSUT, AND THOTHMES I.] Hatshepsut was so proud of her achievement that she caused the shafts to be engraved with an inscription in which she swears, “As Ra loves me, as my father Amen favours me ... as I shall be unto eternity like an Imperishable, as I shall go down in the west like Atum, so surely these two great obelisks which My Majesty hath wrought with electrum for my father, Amen, in order that my name may abide in his temple, enduring for ever and ever, they are of one block of enduring granite, without seam or joining.” She goes on to say, what is still more surprising, that the time occupied in the extraction and transportation of the mighty shafts was seven months! When Thothmes III came to the throne, he showed his love for his distinguished relative by casing her obelisks to a height of 82 feet with sandstone, so that her inscriptions might not be read. As rulers, the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty, male or female, stand in the very front rank; they cannot be said to have shone as exponents of family affection. To the east of his second pylon, Thothmes I had another court, which was altered and added to by Thothmes III, who built also a small pylon in front of his Halls of Records, which come next in the great complex of building, jostling the apartments of Hatshepsut, which stand beside them. In the First Hall of Records stand the two pillars which strike everyone who sees them as one of the beauties of Karnak, and examples of a type not common in Egyptian work. They are of granite, the southern one carved with the Lotus of Upper Egypt, the northern with the Papyrus of Lower Egypt. The Second Hall was turned into the chapel of the temple, in which the sacred bark was kept, by Philip Arrhidæus, at the beginning of the Ptolemaic dominion, so that one of the oldest and one of the newest parts of the building are here united. In the open space behind the chapel lie the scanty remains of the earliest Karnak known to us--that of the XIIth Dynasty. A few broken polygonal columns suggest a kinship in style, for the earliest parts of the great temple, with the work of the XIth Dynasty at Der el-Bahri; but it is impossible to say with the least approach to certainty what the first temple may have looked like. East again of these remnants comes the last important part of the vast building--the great Festal Temple of Thothmes III, with its fine Hall, 144 feet by 52 feet, and its eastern sanctuary and complex of store-chambers.