Amenemhat I., who was a sportsman, and prided himself on “hunting the lion and bringing back the crocodile a prisoner,” may have chosen the point which projected farthest into the Lake (now Medinet-el-Fayûm and Kom-Faris) for the site of his palace and garden. Here he would escape from the pestilential odours that he probably kept about him in his original home, and at the same time enjoy the desert air, cooled by the immense surface of the lake, on which he could indulge his taste for crocodile hunting. The natural attractions which so rare a combination of desert air and open space of water would afford, would probably, under the royal favour, have made the new watering place and sanatorium a fashionable resort for the aristocracy, who would soon have built villas on the borders of the lake along the esplanade of Crocodilopolis, or Shed, as its first name appears to have been. The modern Helouan, a dry treeless spot on the eastern desert a few miles south of Cairo, found favour in the eyes of the late Khedive, Tewfik Pasha, and became a sanatorium for the Cairenes, to whom a good draught of pure desert air must be a real treat after living in the tainted air of Egypt’s unsavoury capital. Helouan has sulphur springs to boast of, but Crocodilopolis had a fine expanse of sweet water to look out upon, instead of a dry, blinding and scorching desert. The area above R.L. 22·50, at first reclaimed from the lake between Lahûn and Medineh, would have been about 10,000 acres; and the king and his favourites would, according to nature, have taken possession of it. But there would have been an extensive shore of habitable ground round the margins of the lake and on each side of the canal connecting the lake with the Nile, which would be within reach of a perpetual water supply and with the means of water transport at the door almost of the habitations.