But whether it is to be considered a palace or a fortress, this is the proper place to study the details of this curious edifice. It forms, indeed, part of an assemblage of funerary buildings, and its situation is immediately in front of a temple, facts which might suggest that its arrangements ought to have been discussed in an earlier chapter. But these arrangements are in fact imitated from those of the ordinary dwellings of the living. Its economy is not that of either tomb or temple. The superposition of one story upon another is found in neither of those classes of buildings but it is found both in military and domestic architecture. So, too, with the mode of lighting the various apartments. The darkness of the tomb is complete, the illumination of the temple is far from brilliant, in its more sacred parts it is almost as dark as the tomb. Prayers could be said to Osiris without inconvenience by the scanty daylight which found its way through the narrow doorway of the sepulchral chapel, but the active pleasures of life required a broader day. We find, therefore, that the pavilion was lighted by windows, real windows, and some of them very large. Nothing is more rare, in the buildings which have come down to us from the pharaonic epochs, than such windows; but then most of those buildings are either tombs or temples. Civil architecture in Egypt had to fulfil pretty much the same requirements as in other countries. It was, therefore, obliged to employ the means which have been found necessary in every other country and at every other period. [Illustration: FIG. 10.--Brackets in the courtyard of the Royal Pavilion.] The employment of the window is not the only structural peculiarity in the pavilion of Medinet-Abou: upon the walls which surround the small court, and between the first and second stories, there are carved stone brackets or consoles, supporting flat slabs of stone. It has sometimes been asserted that these brackets formed supports for masts upon which a velarium was stretched across the court. But neither in engravings nor in photographs have we been able to discover the slightest trace of the holes which would be necessary for the insertion of such masts. But, leaving their purpose on one side, we must call attention to the curious sculptures which are interposed between the upper and lower slabs of these brackets. They are in the shape of grotesque busts, resting upon the lower slab and supporting the upper one with their heads. In the wall above a kind of framed tablet is inserted.[9] In these figures, which are now very much worn and corroded by exposure, we have a repetition of those prisoners of war which occur frequently upon the neighbouring bas-reliefs in similar uncomfortable positions. Such a motive is entirely in place in a building which, by the general features of its architecture, seems a combination of fortress and triumphal arch.