On the western bank of the Nile, opposite Thebes, there lies a great bay of the Libyan cliffs, extending for more than two miles from the ruined palace of Amenhotep III and the temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu on the south, to Drah Abu’l Neggah and the temple of Sety I at Qurneh on the north. From cape to cape of the bay there stretches, like the string of a bow, a row of ruined funerary temples, built by most of the notable Theban Pharaohs. Beyond the line of the string towards the Nile, the two Memnon colossi still keep watch and ward--all that remains of the most gorgeous of all the western temples, reared by the most gorgeous of Theban Pharaohs--Amenhotep III; while between the string and the bow, and clinging close to the curving cliffs, lie the temples of Der el-Medinet and Der el-Bahri. Beyond the northern nock of the bow at Drah Abu’l Neggah, a rugged winding path leads north-westwards into the heart of the hills for about a mile, then turning sharply westwards, it reveals a forked valley, one branch of which is known as the West Valley, and the other and more important as the East Valley. Together these two ravines make up the Biban el-Moluk, or Valley of the Kings, the most famous place of royal sepulture in the world, where for a thousand years the kings of the earliest of world-empires were laid “all of them in glory, everyone in his own house.” They chose for their resting-place one of the wildest and most barren scenes which it is possible to imagine, a sun-scorched wilderness of rock and tumbled stone, where the heat, reverberated from rock to rock under a sky of brass, is like that of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. But it was not beauty or richness that they were seeking when they came to the Valley of the Kings; it was the security which not even the Great Pyramid had been able to give to the mighty dead. The loneliness and desolation of the place were the very things which prompted its selection; for they sought--how vainly the future was to show--a place where human foot had never trod, and where they might expect that their long sleep would be unbroken by any intruder. The sacrilegious attempts of the type of robber who had scattered to the winds the dust of Khufu they foresaw, and tried, though with only imperfect success, to guard against; what they could not foresee was the advent of the scientific excavator, with a patience which rivals and a skill which far surpasses that of the native plunderer, whose work has put the crown on the lengthy demonstration of the futility of all their pathetic efforts at security.