A statue of Ra,[111] to whom the temple is dedicated, stands some twenty feet high in a niche over the doorway, and is supported on either side by a bas-relief portrait of the king in an attitude of worship. Next above these comes a superb hieroglyphic inscription reaching across the whole front; above the inscription, a band of royal cartouches; above the cartouches, a frieze of sitting apes; above the apes, last and highest, some fragments of a cornice. The height of the whole may have been somewhat over a hundred feet. Wherever it has been possible to introduce them as decoration, we see the ovals of the king. Under those sculptured on the platform and over the door I observed the hieroglypic character [Illustration] which, in conjunction with the sign known as the determinative of metals, signifies gold (nub); but when represented, as here, without the determinative, stands for Nubia, the Land of Gold. This addition, which I do not remember to have seen elsewhere in connection with the cartouches of Rameses II,[112] is here used in an heraldic sense, as signifying the sovereignty of Nubia. The relative positions of the two temples of Abou Simbel have been already described--how they are excavated in two adjacent mountains and divided by a cataract of sand. The front of the small temple lies parallel to the course of the Nile, here flowing in a northeasterly direction. The façade of the great temple is cut in the flank of the mountain and faces due east. Thus the colossi, towering above the shoulder of the sand-drift, catch, as it were, a side view of the small temple and confront vessels coming up the river. As for the sand-drift, it curiously resembles the glacier of the Rhone. In size, in shape, in position, in all but color and substance, it is the same. Pent in between the rocks at top, it opens out like a fan at bottom. In this, its inevitable course, it slants downward across the façade of the great temple. Forever descending, drifting, accumulating, it wages the old stealthy war; and, unhasting, unresting, labors, grain by grain, to fill the hollowed chambers and bury the great statues and wrap the whole temple in a winding-sheet of golden sand, so that the place thereof shall know it no more. It had very nearly come to this when Burckhardt went up (A.D. 1813). The top of the doorway was then thirty feet below the surface. Whether the sand will ever reach that height again must depend on the energy with which it is combated. It can only be cleared as it accumulates. To avert it is impossible. Backed by the illimitable wastes of the Libyan desert, the supply from above is inexhaustible. Come it must; and come it will, to the end of time.