Bearing in mind that what is left of the Ramesseum is, as it were, only the backbone of the entire structure, one can still walk from end to end of the building, and still recognize every feature of this description. We turn our backs on the wrecked towers of the first propylon; crossing what was once the first court-yard, we leave to the left the fallen colossus; we enter the second court-yard, and see before us the three entrances to the hall of pillars and the remains of two other statues; we walk up the central avenue of the great hall, and see above our heads architraves studded with yellow stars upon a ground color so luminously blue that it almost matches the sky; thence, passing through a chamber lined with sculptures, we come to the library, upon the door-jambs of which Champollion found the figures of Thoth and Saf, the lord of letters and the lady of the sacred books;[194] finally, among such fragments of sculptured decoration as yet remain, we find the king making offerings to a hieroglyphed list of gods as well as to his deified ancestors; we see the train of captives, and the piles of severed hands;[195] and we discover an immense battle-piece, which is in fact a replica of the famous battle-piece at Abou Simbel. This subject, like its Nubian prototype, yet preserves some of its color. The enemy are shown to be fair-skinned and light-haired, and wear the same Syrian robes; and the river, more green than that at Abou Simbel, is painted in zigzags in the same manner. The king, alone in his chariot, sends arrow after arrow against the flying foe. They leap into the river and swim for their lives. Some are drowned; some cross in safety, and are helped out by their friends on the opposite bank. A red-haired chief, thus rescued, is suspended head downward by his soldiers, in order to let the water that he has swallowed run out of his mouth. The river is once more the Orontes; the city is once more Kadesh; the king is once more Rameses II; and the incidents are again the incidents of the poem of Pentaur. The one wholly unmistakable point in the narrative is, however, the colossal statue of Syenite, the largest in Egypt.”[196] The siege and the river, the troops of captives are to be found elsewhere; but nowhere, save here, a colossus which answers to that description. This statue was larger than even the twin colossi of the plain. They measure eighteen feet three inches across the shoulders; this measures twenty-two feet four inches. They sit about fifty feet high, without their pedestals; this one must have lifted his head some ten feet higher still. “The measure of his foot,” says Diodorus, “exceeded seven cubits;” the Greek cubit being a little over eighteen inches in length. The foot of the fallen Rameses measures nearly eleven feet in length by four feet ten inches in breadth. This, also, is the only very large Theban colossus sculptured in the red syenite of Assûan.[197]