The site of Thebes is an immense amphitheatre with the Nile in the centre. At first you see only a confusion of portals, obelisks and columns peeping through or towering above the palm trees. Gradually you are able to distinguish objects, and the first that strikes you is the ruins of Luxor on the eastern bank. They overlook the Arab village at their base, and consist of a long row of columns and the huge gateway of the Temple of Luxor. The columns are those of an immense portico, and by them stood two beautiful obelisks, one of which is now in the Place de la Concorde, Paris. The columns are monoliths, fully ten feet in diameter, and many of them in a perfect state. All are covered with inscriptions of various signification. This temple was built by Rameses II., and is therefore not one of the oldest in Egypt, though not the least interesting. On the westward or opposite side of the Nile is Memnon and the temple home of Rameses II. There is little or nothing of the temple there, but twin colossal statues stand in lonely desolation on the plain, and these once guarded the temple entrance. One is perfect, the other broken. Both measured sixty-four feet in height. They are sitting giants carved from solid stone. They represented King Amenhotep, in whose honor the temple was built. At their feet are small sitting statues, one of his wife Thi, the other of his mother Mutem-ua, each carved out of red sandstone mixed with white quartz, and each a marvellous exhibition of skill in treating the hardest and most brittle materials. They stand twenty-two feet apart. The northern, or broken one, is that which the Greeks and Romans celebrated in poetry and prose as the “vocal statue of Memnon.” Its legs are covered with inscriptions of Greek, Roman, Phœnician and Egyptian travelers, written to assure the reader that they had really visited the place or had heard the musical tones of Memnon at the rising of the sun. [Illustration: THE COLOSSI.] In the year 27 B.C. the upper part of this statue was removed from its place and thrown down by an earthquake. From that time on, tourists began to mutilate it by cutting into it their befitting or unbefitting remarks. The assurances that they had heard Memnon sing or ring ceased under the reign of Septimius Severus who completed the wanting upper part of the body as well as he could with blocks of stone piled up and fastened together. It is a well known fact that split or cracked rocks, after cooling during the night, at the rising of the sun or as soon as the stone becomes warm, may emit a prolonged ringing note. After the statue was restored in the manner above described, the sound, if ever it emitted any, naturally ceased. The crack was covered by the masonry. [Illustration: THE RAMESEION OF THEBES AND COLOSSAL STATUE OF RAMESES.]