In this arrangement, as in the general character of the bas-relief sculptures which cover the walls and pillars, there is much simplicity, much grace, but nothing particularly new. The façade, on the contrary, is a daring innovation. Here the whole front is but a frame for six recesses, from each of which a colossal statue, erect and lifelike, seems to be walking straight out from the heart of the mountain. These statues, three to the right and three to the left of the doorway, stand thirty feet high, and represent Rameses II and Nefertari, his queen. Mutilated as they are, the male figures are full of spirit and the female figures full of grace. The queen wears on her head the plumes and disk of Hathor. The king is crowned with the pschent and with a fantastic helmet adorned with plumes and horns. They have their children with them; the queen her daughters, the king his sons--infants of ten feet high, whose heads just reach to the parental knee. The walls of these six recesses, as they follow the slope of the mountain, form massive buttresses, the effect of which is wonderfully bold in light and shadow. The doorway gives the only instance of a porch that we saw in either Egypt or Nubia. The superb hieroglyphs which cover the faces of these buttresses and the front of this porch are cut half a foot deep into the rock and are so large that they can be read from the island in the middle of the river. The tale they tell--a tale retold in many varied turns of old Egyptian style upon the architraves within--is singular and interesting. “Rameses, the Strong in Truth, the Beloved of Amen,” says the outer legend, “made this divine abode[113] for his royal wife, Nefertari, whom he loves.” The legend within, after enumerating the titles of the king, records that “his royal wife who loves him, Nefertari the beloved of Maut, constructed for him this abode in the mountain of the pure waters.” On every pillar, in every act of worship pictured on the walls, even in the sanctuary, we find the names of Rameses and Nefertari “coupled and inseparable.” In this double dedication and in the unwonted tenderness of the style one seems to detect traces of some event, perhaps of some anniversary, the particulars of which are lost forever. It may have been a meeting; it may have been a parting; it may have been a prayer answered or a vow fulfilled. We see, at all events, that Rameses and Nefertari desired to leave behind them an imperishable record of the affection which united them on earth and which they hoped would reunite them in Amemti. What more do we need to know? We see that the queen was fair;[114] that the king was in his prime. We divine the rest; and the poetry of the place, at all events, is ours. Even in these barren solitudes there is wafted to us a breath from the shores of old romance. We feel that Love once passed this way and that the ground is still hallowed where he trod.