The way was long, the day was hot, and we had only the map to go by. Having climbed the steep bank and skirted an extensive palm-grove, we found ourselves in a country without paths or roads of any kind. The soil, squared off as usual like a gigantic chess-board, was traversed by hundreds of tiny water-channels, between which we had to steer our course as best we could. Presently the last belt of palms was passed--the plain, green with young corn and level as a lake, widened out at the foot of the mountains--and the temple, islanded in that sea of rippling emerald, rose up before us upon its platform of blackened mounds. It was still full two miles away; but it looked enormous--showing from this distance as a massive, low-browed, sharply defined mass of dead-white masonry. The walls sloped in slightly toward the top; and the façade appeared to be supported on eight square biers, with a large doorway in the center. If sculptured ornament, or cornice, or pictured legend enriched those walls, we were too far off to distinguish them. All looked strangely naked and solemn--more like a tomb than a temple. Nor was the surrounding scene less deathlike in its solitude. Not a tree, not a hut, not a living form broke the green monotony of the plain. Behind the temple, but divided from it by a farther space of mounded ruins, rose the mountains--pinky, aerial, with sheeny sand-drifts heaped in the hollows of their bare buttresses and spaces of soft blue shadow in their misty chasms. Where the range receded, a long vista of glittering desert opened to the Libyan horizon. Then as we drew nearer, coming by and by to a raised causeway which apparently connected the mounds with some point down by the river, the details of the temple gradually emerged into distinctness. We could now see the curve and under shadow of the cornice; and a small object in front of the façade, which looked at first sight like a monolithic altar, resolved itself into a massive gateway, of the kind known as a single pylon. Nearer still, among some low outlying mounds, we came upon fragments of sculptured capitals and mutilated statues half-buried in rank grass--upon a series of stagnant niter-tanks and deserted workshops--upon the telegraph poles and wires which here come striding along the edge of the desert and vanish southward with messages for Nubia and the Soudan.