[Illustration: VULTURE. ISIS WITH THE CHILD. CROUCHING NEÎTH.] They are extraordinarily small, and in order to show the detail I have had the illustrations made twice the actual size, a proceeding that weakens the contours and the modelling. To realize their beauty it is necessary to have held them in the hand. The palm-tree, which has lost some leaves, is a unique object, more curious than elegant, but the mystic boat which is beside it, unique also so far, is a prodigy of delicate chiselling. It is the boat of the god Sokaris, a boat of most archaic construction, and which was already used for the accomplishment of the sacred rites under the Thinite Dynasty. The belly is broad and round, the stern rather heavy, but the bows very light and much decorated. It rests on a sort of side-ladder of beams and ropes, which is itself built on to a sledge: it was pulled along in the public ceremonies by means of a rope put through a hole made in the curved front of the sledge. The decoration and the equipage are most curious. On the bow is a gazelle’s head with straight horns turned to the interior, and along the prow a row of divergent plates of thin metal, the use of which is not very clear: it is as if the carcase of the gazelle was opened and showed the ribs fixed on the spine. At the back, to terminate the poop, there is a ram’s head with curved horns. In the middle, on an oblong rectangular pedestal, a hawk proudly perches; behind him are the four oar-rudders, two on each side; in front of him six little hawks ascend in procession, two by two, towards the gazelle’s head, led by a Nile fish placed edgeways on its ventral fin. For the moment I will not attempt to explain the meaning of these emblems, but what we can never grow tired of admiring is the cleverness with which the craftsman has grouped these widely differing elements into an harmonious whole, and especially the extraordinary skill with which he worked his metal. His gazelle’s head, a mere fraction of an inch in size, is of as proud a bearing as if it were of natural size: everything is exact, intelligent; the curve of the forehead, the flattening of the snout, the expression of the face, even to the natural pout of the creature. Each of the six hawks preserves its individual physiognomy, and the fish itself, reduced in size as it is, has the exact shape of the big Nile perch, and not that of any sort of fish. Similar qualities are to be seen in the neighbouring pieces, in the ram’s head, the ordinary hawk, the hawk with a human head, and that with a ram’s head, and in the vulture. The seated Isis who nurses her child on her lap and the crouching Neîth have their usual characteristics of resignation and gentleness, and at the same time the simplicity of line that lends so dignified an air to the smallest Egyptian figures. It has all been chiselled out of the ingot itself, and the detail cut with so minute a point that we ask where the artisan could have obtained it.