2. The site of El Kab is a large one. The area inside the town walls alone would have required to clear it five times the money we had at our disposal; and besides that, there was the hill of XVIIIth dynasty tombs, the cemeteries outside the walls, and the temples far up on the desert. It was necessary to make careful choice of such spots as would repay the labour expended on them. The most obvious place to search would be the sandstone hill in which we lived, where the fine inscribed tombs of Paheri and Aahmes are well known. But is there much chance of finding inscribed tombs anywhere in Egypt except at Thebes? We know that the tomb was left open for the visits of relatives, and open it must always have remained, unless it got drifted up with sand, or unless the quarrying of another tomb on a higher level sent down a mass of chips which hid it. At the capital, tombs were often lost for long periods in this way; in less crowded cemeteries the accident would seem to be less likely to happen. Many traces in the existing tombs at El Kab show that earlier tombs were quarried away in order to make room for them. This would seem to minimise the chances of finding anything valuable of early date; and if by chance some inscribed tomb still remains hidden in the talus of chips in the lower part of the hill, the business of making a thorough search there would be so long and expensive that it will probably remain undiscovered. 3. The greatest monument at El Kab is the town wall, the huge mass of which must arrest the attention of every passer-by on the river. It encloses a great square of about 580 yards in the side; the walls are 40 feet thick, and in most places still reach a height of 20 feet. The diagonal of the square runs, roughly, N. and S., and the S.W. wall is parallel to the river. The S.W. corner has disappeared; indeed the river now runs over the point where it must have stood. There is evidence that the Nile has moved eastward at this point, but not to any great extent, within the last 2000 years, for some remains of a landing-stage, believed to be Roman, can still be seen a little south of the town. About a quarter of the area inside the walls was cut off from the rest by a curved double wall, and only inside this smaller area are there many traces of buildings. Here, in the early part of the century, was a large mound, but now the sebakhin have carried it all away, and we look over a most desolate space, at one part red with the broken pottery of all periods, thrown out from the sebakh-digger's sieve, at another white with the salt that everywhere permeates the soil. A few great brick walls remain, and the foundations of the temple, but no part of the superstructure. Outside this town, but inside the great square of the walls, the character of the ground is quite different. There are no great masses of pottery, hardly any brick walls; in the lower parts little parallel ridges in the soil