The smaller temple at the same place has six standing figures of deities countersunk in the rock, and is carved with exceeding richness. It is of the same age with the large temple, but will not admit of comparison with it owing to the inferiority of the design. Besides these, there is a very beautiful though small example at Kalabsheh (known as the Bayt el Wellee, “the house of the saint”), likewise belonging to the age of Rameses II., and remarkable for the beauty of its sculptural bas-reliefs, as well as for the bold Proto-Doric columns which adorn its vestibule. There are also smaller ones at Dêrr and Balagne, at the upper end of the valley. At Wâdy Saboua and Gerf Hussên, the cells of the temple have been excavated from the rock, but their courts and propylons are structural buildings added in front—a combination only found once in Egypt, at Thebes (Dêr-el-Bahree), and very rare anywhere else, although meeting the difficulties of the case better than any other arrangement, inasmuch as the sanctuary has thus all the imperishability and mystery of a cave, and the temple at the same time has the space and external appearance of a building standing in the open air. This last arrangement is found also as a characteristic of the temples of Gebel Barkal, in the kingdom of Meroë, showing how far the rock-cutting practice prevailed in the Upper Valley of the Nile. The plan on which the Temple of Dêr-el-Bahree is constructed is curious, and differs entirely from that of any other in Egypt. It is built in stages up a slope at the foot of the mountain, flights of steps leading from one court to the other. The temple was built by Queen Hatshepsu or Amen-noo-het, the sister of Thothmes II. and Thothmes III., and consisted of three courts rising in terraces one above the other; at the back of these were two ranges of porticoes, the upper one set back behind the lower and built into the vertical face of the rock with which the sanctuary and antechambers were cut. As all the temples above mentioned are contemporary with the great structures in Egypt, it seems strange that the eternity of a rock-cut example did not recommend this form of temple to the attention of the Egyptians themselves. But with the exception of Dêr-el-Bahree and a small grotto, called the Speos Artemidos, near Beni-Hasan, and two small caves at Silsilis, near the Cataract, the Egyptians seem never to have attempted it, trusting apparently to the solidity of their masonic structures for that eternity of duration they aspired to. MAMMEISI. [Illustration: 31. Mammeisi at Elephantine.]