For here is a place in which time seems to have stood as still as in that immortal palace where everything went to sleep for a hundred years. The bas-reliefs on the walls, the intricate paintings on the ceilings, the colors upon the capitals, are incredibly fresh and perfect. These exquisite capitals have long been the wonder and delight of travelers in Egypt. They are all studied from natural forms--from the lotus in bud and blossom, the papyrus, and the palm. Conventionalized with consummate skill, they are at the same time so justly proportioned to the height and girth of the columns as to give an air of wonderful lightness to the whole structure. But above all, it is with the color--color conceived in the tender and pathetic minor of Watteau and Lancret and Greuze--that one is most fascinated. Of those delicate half-tones, the fac-simile in the “Grammar of Ornament” conveys not the remotest idea. Every tint is softened, intermixed, degraded. The pinks are coralline; the greens are tempered with verditer; the blues are of a greenish turquoise, like the western half of an autumnal evening sky. Later on, when we returned to Philæ from the second cataract, the writer devoted the best part of three days to making a careful study of a corner of this portico; patiently matching those subtle variations of tint and endeavoring to master the secret of their combination.[57] Architecturally, this court is unlike any we have yet seen, being quite small, and open to the sky in the center, like the atrium of a Roman house. The light thus admitted glows overhead, lies in a square patch on the ground below, and is reflected upon the pictured recesses of the ceiling. At the upper end, where the pillars stand two deep, there was originally an intercolumnar screen. The rough sides of the columns show where the connecting blocks have been torn away. The pavement, too, has been pulled up by treasure-seekers, and the ground is strewn with broken slabs and fragments of shattered cornice. These are the only signs of ruin--signs traced not by the finger of time, but by the hand of the spoiler. So fresh, so fair is all the rest, that we are fain to cheat ourselves for a moment into the belief that what we see is work not marred, but arrested. Those columns, depend on it, are yet unfinished. That pavement is about to be relaid. It would not surprise us to find the masons here to-morrow morning, or the sculptor, with mallet and chisel, carrying on that band of lotus buds and bees. Far more difficult is it to believe that they all struck work forever some two-and-twenty centuries ago. Here and there, where the foundations have been disturbed, one sees that the columns are constructed of sculptured blocks, the fragments of some earlier temple; while, at a height of about six feet from the ground, a Greek cross cut deep into the side of the shaft stamps upon each pillar the seal of Christian worship.