The external decorations of the two lodges are of especial interest. The lower subjects are historical. Those upon the upper stories are domestic or symbolical, and are among the most celebrated of Egyptian bas-reliefs. They have long been supposed to represent Rameses III in his hareem, entertained and waited upon by female slaves. In one group the king, distinguished always by his cartouches, sits at ease in a kind of folding-chair, his helmet on his head, his sandaled feet upon a footstool, as one returned and resting after battle. In his left hand he holds a round object like a fruit. With the right he chucks under the chin an ear-ringed and necklaced damsel, who presents a lotus-blossom at his nose. In another much mutilated subject they are represented playing a game at draughts. This famous subject--which can only be seen when the light strikes sidewise--would scarcely be intelligible save for the help one derives from the cuts in Wilkinson and the plates in Rosellini. It is not that the sculptures are effaced, but that the great blocks which bore them are gone from their places, having probably been hurled down bodily upon the heads of the enemy during a certain siege of which the ruins bear evident traces.[203] Of the lady there remains little besides the arm and the hand that holds the pawn. The table has disappeared. The king has lost his legs. It happens, however, though the table is missing, that the block next above it contained the pawns, which can still be discerned from below by the help of a glass. Rosellini mentions three or four more subjects of a similar character, including a second group of draught-players, all visible in his time. The writer, however, looked for them in vain. These tableaux are supposed to illustrate the home-life of Rameses III, and to confirm the domestic character of the pavilion. Even the scarab-selling Arabs that haunt the ruins, even the donkey boys of Luxor, call it the hareem of the sultan. Modern science, however, threatens to dispel one at least of these pleasant fancies. The king, it seems, under the name of Rhampsinitus, is the hero of a very ancient legend related by Herodotus. While he yet lived, runs the story, he descended into hades, and there played a game at draughts with the Goddess Demeter, from whom he won a golden napkin; in memory of which adventure, and of his return to earth, “the Egyptians,” says Herodotus, “instituted a festival which they certainly celebrated in my day.”[204] In another version as told by Plutarch, Isis is substituted for Demeter. Viewing these tales by the light of a certain passage of the ritual, in which the happy dead is promised “power to transform himself at will, to play at draughts, to repose in a pavilion,” Dr. Birch has suggested that the whole of this scene may be of a memorial character, and represent an incident in the land of shades.[205]