We first saw the twin pylons of Dakkeh some weeks ago from the deck of the Philæ and we then likened them to the majestic towers of Edfu. Approaching them now by land, we are surprised to find them so small. It is a brilliant, hot morning; and our way lies by the river, between the lentil-slope and the castor-berry patches. There are flocks of pigeons flying low overhead; barking dogs and crowing cocks in the village close by; and all over the path hundreds of beetles--real live scarabs, black as coal and busy as ants--rolling their clay pellets up from the water’s edge to the desert. If we were to examine a score or so of these pellets we should here and there find one that contained no eggs; for it is a curious fact that the scarab-beetle makes and rolls her pellets, whether she has an egg to deposit or not. The female beetle, though assisted by the male, is said to do the heavier share of the pellet-rolling; and if evening comes on before her pellet is safely stowed away, she will sleep, holding it with her feet all night, and resume her labor in the morning.[160] The temple here--begun by an Ethiopian king named Arkaman (Ergamenes) about whom Diodorus has a long story to tell, and carried on by the Ptolemies and Cæsars--stands in a desolate open space to the north of the village, and is approached by an avenue, the walls of which are constructed with blocks from some earlier building. The whole of this avenue and all the waste ground for three or four hundred yards round about the temple is not merely strewn, but piled, with fragments of pottery, pebbles and large, smooth stones of porphery, alabaster, basalt, and a kind of marble like verde antico. These stones are puzzling. They look as if they might be fragments of statues that had been rolled and polished by ages of friction in the bed of a torrent. Among the potsherds we find some inscribed fragments like those of Elephantine.[161] Of the temple I will only say that, as masonry, it is better put together than any work of the eighteenth or nineteenth dynasties with which I am acquainted. The sculptures, however, are atrocious. Such misshapen hieroglyphs; such dumpy, smirking goddesses; such clownish kings in such preposterous head-dresses, we have never seen till now. The whole thing, in short, as regards sculpturesque style, is the Ptolemaic out-Ptolemied. Rowing round presently to Kobban--the river running wide with the sand island between--we land under the walls of a huge crude brick structure, black with age, which at first sight looks quite shapeless; but which proves to be an ancient Egyptian fortress, buttressed, towered, loop-holed, finished at the angles with the invariable molded torus, and surrounded by a deep dry moat, which is probably yet filled each summer by the inundation.