We hurried on to the great temple, without waiting to examine the lesser one in detail. A solemn twilight reigned in the first hall, beyond which all was dark. Eight colossi, four to the right and four to the left, stand ranged down the center, bearing the mountain on their heads. Their height is twenty-five feet. With hands crossed on their breasts, they clasp the flail and crook--emblems of majesty and dominion. It is the attitude of Osiris, but the face is the face of Rameses II. Seen by this dim light, shadowy, mournful, majestic, they look as if they remembered the past. Beyond the first hall lies a second hall supported on four square pillars; beyond this, again, a transverse chamber, the walls of which are covered with colored bas-reliefs of various gods; last of all, the sanctuary. Here, side by side, sit four figures larger than life--Ptah, Amen-Ra, Ra and Rameses deified. Before them stands an altar, in shape a truncated pyramid, cut from the solid rock. Traces of color yet linger on the garments of the statues; while in the walls on either side are holes and grooves such as might have been made to receive a screen of metal-work. The air in the sanctuary was heavy with an acrid smoke, as if the priests had been burning some strange incense and were only just gone. For this illusion we were indebted to the visitors who had been there before us. They had lit the place with magnesian wire; the vapor of which lingers long in these unventilated vaults. To settle down then and there to a steady investigation of the wall-sculptures was impossible. We did not attempt it. Wandering from hall to hall, from chamber to chamber; now trusting to the faint gleams that straggled in from without, now stumbling along by the light of a bunch of candles tied to the end of a stick, we preferred to receive those first impressions of vastness, of mystery, of gloomy magnificence, which are the more profound for being somewhat vague and general. Scenes of war, of triumph, of worship, passed before our eyes like the incidents of a panorama. Here the king, borne along at full gallop by plumed steeds gorgeously caparisoned, draws his mighty bow and attacks a battlemented fortress. The besieged, some of whom are transfixed by his tremendous arrows, supplicate for mercy. They are a Syrian people and are by some identified with the northern Hittites. Their skin is yellow; and they wear the long hair and beard, the fillet, the rich robe, fringed cape and embroidered baldric with which we are familiar in the Nineveh sculptures. A man driving off cattle in the foreground looks as if he had stepped out of one of the tablets in the British Museum. Rameses meanwhile towers, swift and godlike, above the crowd. His coursers are of such immortal strain as were the coursers of Achilles. His sons, his whole army, chariot and horse, follow headlong at his heels. All is movement and the splendor of battle.