function to make an avowal of his faith which was proscribed under the Emperor Diocletian. He was tortured and eventually beheaded. His friends begged or stole his body, tied it on a camel and determined to found a settlement wherever the camel should lie down. Menas before death had expressed a wish to be buried near Lake Mariut, and here surely enough the camel insisted on lying down, and could not be induced to go further—so his followers buried the body on the spot. Many miracles were reported of his tomb, the settlement became a large Christian city with a magnificent cathedral built of granite from Assuan and marble from Italy. For some centuries the place became a resort for pilgrimage from all parts of the near East, but soon after the Arab conquest it was despoiled to provide material for the mosques in Alexandria and Cairo. Gradually the ruins were silted up with the ever-shifting sand, becoming mere mounds, and it was the chance discovery of a small terra-cotta plaque imprinted with the figure of Menas, standing erect with arms outstretched between two kneeling camels and a rough inscription, that led Herr Kauffmann and his friend to unearth the great basilica which had contained the tomb. The walls of the cathedral appear to have been lined with marble, whilst small pieces of mosaic on the floor give the impression that the dome was probably adorned in the same way. Some of the bases and capitals of the pillars are decorated after the Greek style with acanthus leaf ornaments, others in the stricter Roman method of straight panels. The dwelling-houses are small and constructed in blocks separated by narrow streets. Not far distant, on the coast, stand the ruins of Abusir (the Taposiris Magna of the Romans) which was evidently used as a port of arrival and departure by the thousands of pilgrims who came across the sea to pay their vows in this hallowed sanctuary. When I visited this place it was garrisoned by the very efficient Indian Camel Corps which the Maharajah of Bikaner had sent as his contribution to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Your interesting sketch of the rise of the great Senussi, the establishment of his now widespread confraternity and his invasion, at the instigation of German and Turkish officers and officials, of Egypt in 1915; his hostile occupation of the oases and the successful campaign so ably directed by General Sir W. Peyton, which finally drove his forces across the frontier and re-established Egyptian domination in the Western Desert, merits careful perusal if the reader wishes to understand the last of that series of invasions from the West which began in the days of the Pharaoh Mereneptah, nearly three thousand five hundred years ago, and which, given favourable conditions, may yet be repeated.