The preservation of the temple is, and will continue to be, a work almost as great, and as difficult, as its erection. It lies in the hands of the Egyptian Service of Antiquities, and is a task as unending as the web of Penelope. Generally speaking, such work is of the kind which has to be its own reward, for it makes no appeal to the average visitor, who only sees that his enjoyment of this court or that is more or less hindered by the progress of work whose one merit is that it will keep safe for future generations priceless treasures which otherwise would ere long pass away. Sometimes, however, the work does bring other prizes in its train. [Illustration: 16. LUXOR, FORECOURT OF AMENHOTEP III.] Such was the case when, in November, 1903, M. Legrain, in the course of his work near the pylon of Thothmes III by which we returned to the central court after our digression to the south, found what has since been known as “the Karnak Cachette,” a great pit full of pieces of sculpture of all types and periods. “For a year and eight months,” wrote Maspero in February, 1905, “we have been fishing for statues in the Temple of Karnak.... Seven hundred stone monuments have already come out of the water, and we are not yet at the end.... Statues whole and in fragments, busts, mutilated trunks, headless bodies, bodiless heads, vases on which there were only broken feet, Pharaohs enthroned, queens standing upright, priests of Amon and individuals holding naos, or images of gods, in front of them, crouching, kneeling, sitting, found in all the attitudes of their profession or rank, in limestone, in black or pink granite, in yellow or red sandstone, in green breccia, in schist, in alabaster--indeed, a whole population returns to the upper air and demands shelter in the galleries of the Museum.”