After a year in England, for the working out and publication of the survey at the pyramids, described in the last chapter, I undertook to excavate for the Egypt Exploration Fund. And as great things were then expected from Tanis, and a special fund of £1000 was in course of being raised for its clearance, the most desirable course was to ascertain what prospects really existed there. A preliminary exploring trip was made to several places in the Delta, in course of which I discovered Naukratis; and as soon as the marshes had somewhat dried I went in February to Tanis. It is an out-of-the-way place, inaccessible except by water during some months, twenty miles from a post or station; on three sides the marshy plains stretch away to the horizon, only a little cultivation existing on the south. When I arrived the mounds were almost impassable for the mud, and continual storms threatened my tent. But gradually I built a house on the top of the mounds, and from thence looked down over the work on one side, and over the village on the other. Tanis is a great ring of mounds, around the wide plain in which lie the temple ruins. And the first day I went over it I saw that the temple site was worked out; the limits of the ruins had been reached, and no more statues or buildings should be hoped for, by the side of what was already known. But such were the large expectations about the site, that I had to prove the case, by a great amount of fruitless trenching in all directions. The only monuments that we unearthed were far out of the temple, in a Ptolemaic shrine; this contained a fine stele of Ptolemy II and Arsinoe, which was entirely gilt when discovered, and two or three other steles, the recess containing the large stele being flanked by two sphinxes. The main stele and sphinxes are now in the British Museum. But though digging was not productive in the temple, yet I found two important monuments which had been exposed by Mariette’s excavators, and yet were never noticed by himself, De Rougé, or others who studied the remains. One was a part of an obelisk of the thirteenth dynasty, with an inscription of a king’s son, Nehesi, perhaps the son of the king Nehesi-Ra. The other was the upper part of the well-known stele of Tirhaka: this I found lying face up; and on searching every block of the same quality for the remainder of it, I turned up the lower half, which Mariette had hidden; thus the unknown led me to the known. [Illustration: 18. STELE OF PTOLEMY II.]