The island of Malta as seen to-day is an almost treeless, though not unfertile, stretch of rock, with a harbour on the north coast which must always make the place a necessary possession to the first sea power of Europe. Much of its soil is of comparatively modern creation, and four thousand years ago the island may well have had a forbidding aspect. This is perhaps the reason why the first great inroads of neolithic man into the Mediterranean left it quite untouched, although it lay directly in the path of tribes immigrating into Europe from Africa. The earliest neolithic remains of Italy, Crete, and the AEgean seem to have no parallel in Malta, and the first inhabitants of whom we find traces in the island were builders of megalithic monuments. Small as Malta is it contains some of the grandest and most important structures of this kind ever erected. The two greatest of these, the so-called "Phoenician temples" of Hagiar Kim and Mnaidra, were constructed on opposite sides of one of the southern valleys, each within sight of the other and of the little rocky island of Filfla. [Illustration: FIG. 21. Plan of the megalithic sanctuary of Mnaidra, Malta. (After Albert Mayr's plan.)] The temple of Mnaidra is the simpler of the two in plan (Fig. 21). It consists of two halves, the more northerly of which was almost certainly built later than the other. Each half consists of two elliptical chambers set one behind the other. The south half is the better preserved. It has a concave facade of large orthostatic slabs with horizontal blocks set in front of them to keep them in position. In the centre of this opens a short paved passage formed of fine upright slabs of stone, one of which is 13 feet in height. The first elliptical chamber (_E_) into which this passage leads us has a length of 45 feet. Its walls (Pl. III) consist of roughly squared orthostatic slabs over 6 feet in height, above which are several courses of horizontal blocks which carry the walls in places up to a height of nearly 14 feet. This combination of vertical and horizontal masonry is typical of all the Maltese temples. To the left of the entrance is a rectangular niche in the wall containing one of the remarkable trilithons (_a_) which form so striking a feature of Mnaidra and Hagiar Kim. It consists of a horizontal slab of stone nearly 10 feet in length, supported at its ends by two vertical slabs about 5 feet high. To the right of the entrance is a window-like opening (_b_, behind the seated figure in Pl. III) in one of the slabs of the wall, preceded by two steps and giving access to an irregular triangular space (_F_). In the north-west angle of this triangle is fixed a trilithon table (_c_) of the usual type, 32 inches high; at a like height above the table is fixed another horizontal slab which serves as a roof to the corner. The south corner of the triangle is shut off by a vertical slab, in which is cut a window 29 inches by 17.