But how, may we venture to enquire, came obelisks, the offspring of the rising sun, on the Hades side of the Nile? Can the river have changed its course? Alas! no. It is the whim of woman. Hatasou erected the grandest obelisks in existence; she covered the whole shaft, with the exception of the carvings, with gold. She erected a temple that stepped up the side of a mountain, as if it were a flight of stairs. She governed Egypt, the two worlds, and maintained the dignity of the diadems of the upper and lower country during one of the most brilliant periods of Egypt’s greatness; and now we find her imparting sunshine to the dead, and by exception proving the rule, that no obelisks are to be found on the western bank of the Nile, saving her own, and the flouted fragments of Fyoom. “She hath made this work for her father Amun-re, lord of the regions; she hath erected to him this handsome gateway * * * Amun protects the work * * * she hath done this to whom life is given for ever.”[27] So says the Pharaoh Amun-noo-het, or Hatasou. Turn we now to the eastern bank of the Nile, and we find the Arab village of Luxor grown up like a parasitic fungus over the ruins of once stately edifices, the grand temple of Amenophis III., where the Colossi of Rameses guard the entrance; and two miles away, the still more magnificent ruin of the temple of Usertesen and his successors: but of these anon. [27] Murray. The inscription on the paw of the sphynx, already noted, has reminded us how precious to the Egyptian is every “spot of harvest-bearing land,” so precious that not a tittle could be spared for the interment of the dead; the sands were too shifting, and the sandstone rock alone remained for the purposes of burial. The sandstone rock forms a broad shelf at the border of the desert, and thence mounts up in terraces to the summit of the mountain-range. Cheops and Chephren, and the kings of the early dynasties, had the power and the means of raising mountains over their embalmed and mummified remains; but for the people, must suffice a more humble resting-place;—for them a hole was scooped out on the platform of rock, to be built up at its entrance until the day of resurrection should arrive. In the neighbourhood of the Pyramids, the cemetery of kings, the sandstone rock is honeycombed with tombs, in which the population of every degree have their appropriate sepulchral niche. In later times these tombs have been ransacked for antiquarian relics and for the riches they contained; and the desert around is still thickly carpeted with a profuse accumulation of fragments of mummies and mummy-cases, and vestments of every kind.