All communication being cut off between the courts and the portico, we had to go round outside and through a door at the farther end of the temple in order to reach the sanctuary and the adjoining chambers. The Arab who kept the key provided an inch or two of candle. For it was very dark in there; the roof being still perfect, with a large, rambling, modern house built on the top of it--so that if this part of the temple was ever partially lighted, as at Denderah and elsewhere, by small wedge-like openings in the roof, even those faint gleams were excluded. The sanctuary, which was rebuilt in the reign of Alexander Ægus; some small side chambers; and a large hall, which was perhaps the hall of assembly, were all that remained under cover of the original roofing-stones. Some half-buried and broken columns on the side next the river showed, however, that this end was formerly surrounded by a colonnade. The sanctuary--an oblong granite chamber with its own separate roof--stands inclosed in a larger hall, like a box within a box, and is covered inside and outside with bas-reliefs. These sculptures (among which I observed a kneeling figure of the king, offering a kneeling image of Amen Ra) are executed in the mediocre style of the Ptolemies. That is to say, the forms are more natural but less refined than those of the Pharaonic period. The limbs are fleshy, the joints large, the features insignificant. Of actual portraiture one cannot detect a trace; while every face wears the same objectionable smirk which disfigures the Cleopatra of Denderah. In the large hall, which I have called the hall of assembly, one is carried back to the time of the founder. Between Amenhotep III and Alexander Ægus there lies a great gulf of twelve hundred years; and their styles are as widely separated as their reigns. The merest novice could not possibly mistake the one for the other. Nothing is, of course, more common than to find Egyptian and Græco-Egyptian work side by side in the same temple; but nowhere are the distinctive characteristics of each brought into stronger contrast than in these dark chambers of Luxor. In the sculptures that line the hall of Amenhotep we find the pure lines, the severe and slender forms, the characteristic heads of a period when the art, having as yet neither gained or lost by foreign influences, was entirely Egyptian. The subjects relate chiefly to the infancy of the king; but it is difficult to see anything properly by the light of a candle tied to the end of a stick; and here, where the bas-relief is so low and the walls are so high, it is almost impossible to distinguish the details of the upper tableaux.