Such, linked each to each, by a running commentary of text, are the illustrations. The story is written elsewhere. Elaborately hieroglyphed in upward of seventy closely packed columns, it covers the whole eastern face of the great north tower of the second propylon. This propylon divides the Osiride and Hypæthral courts, so that the inscription faces those entering the temple and precedes the tableaux. Not even the poem of Pentaur is more picturesque, not even the psalms of David are more fervid, than the style of this great chronicle.[211] The writer pitched her tent in the doorway of the first propylon, and thence sketched the northwest corner of the court-yard, including the tower with the inscription and the Osiride colossi. The roof of the colonnade to the right is cumbered with crude-brick ruins of mediæval date. The hieroglyphs, sculptured along the architrave and down the sides of the pillars, are still bright with color. The colossi are all the worse for three thousand years of ill-usage. Through the sculptured doorway opposite, one looks across the hypæthral court, and catches a glimpse of the ruined hall of pillars beyond. While the writer was at work in the shade of the first pylon, an Arab story-teller took possession of the opposite doorway, and entertained the donkey boys and sailors. Well paid with a little tobacco and a few copper piasters, he went on for hours, his shrill chant rising every now and then to a quavering scream. He was a wizened, grizzled old fellow, miserably poor and tattered; but he had the “Arabian Nights” and hundreds of other tales by heart. Mariette was of opinion that the temple of Medinet Habu, erected as it is on the side of the great Theban necropolis, is like the Ramesseum, a funerary monument erected by Rameses III in his own lifetime to his own memory. These battered colossi represent the king in the character of Osiris, and are in fact on a huge scale precisely what the ordinary funerary statuettes are upon a small scale. They would be out of place in any but a monumental edifice; and they alone suffice to determine the character of the building.