It is interesting to compare these heads with the accompanying profile of one of the caryatid colossi inside the great temple of Abou Simbel; and all three with one of the giant portraits of the façade. This last, whether regarded as a marvel of size or of portraiture, is the chef-d’œuvre of Egyptian sculpture. We here see the great king in his prime. His features are identical with those of the head at Bayt-el-Welly; but the contours are more amply filled in and the expression is altogether changed. The man is full fifteen or twenty years older. He has outlived that rage of early youth. He is no longer impulsive, but implacable. A godlike serenity, an almost superhuman pride, an immutable will, breathe from the sculptured stone. He has learned to believe his prowess irresistible and himself almost divine. If he now raised his arm to slay it would be with the stern placidity of a destroying angel. [Illustration] The annexed wood-cut gives the profile of the southern-most colossus, which is the only perfect--or very nearly perfect--one of the four. The original can be correctly seen from but one point of view; and that point is [Illustration: PROFILE OF RAMESES II. (From the southernmost colossus, Abou Simbel.)] where the sand-slope meets the northern buttress of the façade, at a level just parallel with the beards of the statues. It was thence that the present outline was taken. The sand-slope is steep and loose and hot to the feet. More disagreeable climbing it would be hard to find, even in Nubia; but no traveler who refuses to encounter this small hardship need believe that he has seen the faces of the colossi. Viewed from below, this beautiful portrait is foreshortened out of all proportion. It looks unduly wide from ear to ear, while the lips and the lower part of the nose show relatively larger than the rest of the features. The same may be said of the great cast in the British Museum. Cooped up at the end of a narrow corridor and lifted not more than fifteen feet above the ground, it is carefully placed so as to be wrong from every point of view and shown to the greatest possible disadvantage. The artists who wrought the original statues were, however, embarrassed by no difficulties of focus, daunted by no difficulties of scale. Giants themselves, they summoned these giants from out the solid rock and endowed them with superhuman strength and beauty. They sought no quarried blocks of syenite or granite for their work. They fashioned no models of clay. They took a mountain and fell upon it like Titans and hollowed and carved it as though it were a cherry stone; and left it for the feebler men of after ages to marvel at forever. One great hall and fifteen spacious chambers they hewed out from the heart of it, then smoothed the rugged precipice toward the river, and cut four huge statues with their faces to the sunrise, two to the right and two to the left of the doorway, there to keep watch to the end of time.