There is a magnificent temple here, and close by, excavated in the cliff, a rock-cut speos, the local name of which is Bay-tel-Well. The sculptures of this famous speos have been more frequently described and engraved than almost any sculptures in Egypt. The procession of Ethiopian tribute-bearers, the assault of the Amorite city, the triumph of Rameses, are familiar not only to every reader of Wilkinson, but to every visitor passing through the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum. Notwithstanding the casts that have been taken from them, and the ill-treatment to which they have been subjected by natives and visitors, they are still beautiful. The colour of those in the roofless court-yard, though so perfect when Bonomi executed his admirable fac-similes, has now almost entirely peeled off; but in the portico and inner chambers it is yet brilliant. An emerald-green Osiris, a crimson Anubis, and an Isis of the brightest chrome yellow, are astonishingly pure and forcibly in quality. As for the flesh-tones of the Anubis, this was, I believe, the only instance I observed of a true crimson in Egypt pigments. Between the speos of Bayt-el-Welly and the neighboring temple of Kalabsheh there lies about half a mile of hilly pathway and a gulf of fourteen hundred years. Rameses ushers us into the presence of Augustus, and we pass, as it were, from an oratory in the great house of Pharaoh to the presence-chambers of the Cæsars. But if the decorative work in the presence-chamber of the Cæsars was anything like the decorative work in the temple of Kalabsheh, then the taste thereof was of the vilest. Such a masquerade of deities; such striped and spotted and cross-barred robes; such outrageous head-dresses; such crude and violent coloring,[165] we have never seen the like of. As for the goddesses, they are gaudier than the dancing damsels of Luxur; while the kings balance on their heads diadems compounded of horns, moons, birds, balls, beetles, lotus-blossoms, asps, vases, and feathers. The temple, however, is conceived on a grand scale. It is the Karnak of Nubia. But it is a Karnak that has evidently been visited by a shock of earthquake far more severe than that which shook the mighty pillars of the hypostyle hall and flung down the obelisk of Hatasu. From the river it looks like a huge fortress; but, seen from the threshold of the main gateway, it is a wilderness of ruin. Fallen blocks, pillars, capitals, entablatures, lie so extravagantly piled that there is not one spot in all those halls and courtyards upon which it is possible to set one’s foot on the level of the original pavement. Here, again, the earthquake seems to have come before the work was completed. There are figures outlined on the walls, but never sculptured. Others have been begun, but never finished. You can see where the chisel stopped--you can even detect which was the last mark it made on the surface. One traces here, in fact, the four processes of wall decoration.