When we arrived here at the beginning of November, the whole plain, as far as we could see, was inundated, and formed a single ocean, from which the Sanamât arose more strange and lonely than from the green and accessible fields. I have a few days since measured the colossi, as also the rise of the Nile deposit on the bases of their thrones. The height of the Memnon statue, reckoned from head to foot, but without the tall headdress they once wore, was 14·28 metres, or 45½ feet, and to this the base, another block, 4·25 metres, or 13 feet 7 inches, of which about three feet was hidden by a surrounding step. Thus the statues originally stood nearly sixty feet (perhaps nearly seventy feet with the pshent) above the level of the temple. Now the level of the valley is eight feet above this soil, and the inundation sometimes rises to the upper edge of the bases, therefore fourteen feet higher than it could have done at this time of its erection, if the water was not to reach the temple. If this fact be added to our discovery at Semneh, where the mirror of the Nile had sunk above twenty-three feet in historical times, it is plain from that simple addition, that the Nile in the cataracts, between here and Semneh, fell at least thirty-seven feet deeper then than now. The last king, too, of that great eighteenth dynasty, Horus, had erected a temple in the neighbourhood of Medînet Habu, which, however, is now buried in the rubbish. The fragments of a colossal statue of the king in hard, almost marble, limestone, the bust of which formed in the most perfect style, weighing several hundred centenaries, is intended for our museum, seem to indicate the position of the former temple entrance. Two temples of the next dynasty are preserved, which were built by the two mightiest and most celebrated of all the Pharaohs, Sethos I., and his son Ramses II. The temple of the former is the northernmost in position, and is usually denominated the temple of Qurna, as the old village of Qurna here grew up round a Koptic church, lying principally within the great temple courts, but was subsequently abandoned by the inhabitants, and changed for the rock tombs of the neighbouring mountain spur.