The southernmost, which may be assumed as the type, has an upright door, flanked by a stone bench of three steps. Over the entrance is a defaced ornament which may have been the bust of a man: in Rüppell it is a kind of geometrical design. The frontage has two parallel horizontal lines, raised to represent cornices. Each bears a decoration resembling crenelles or Oriental ramparts broken into three steps; the lower set numbers eight, including the half ornaments at the corners, and the higher seven. The interior is a mixture of upright recesses, probably intended for the gods or demons; and of horizontal loculi, whose grooves show that they had lids. There is no symmetry in the niches, in the sarcophagi, or in the paths and passages threading the graves. The disposition will best be understood from the ground-plans drawn by the young Egyptian officers: their sketches of the façades are too careless and incorrect for use; but the want is supplied by the photographs of M. Lacaze. Above these three "Tombs of the Kings" are many rock-cavities which may or may not have been sepulchral. Time has done his worst with them. We mounted the background of a quoin-shaped hill by a well-trodden path, leading to the remnants of a rude Burj ("watch-tower"), and to a semicircle of dry wall, garnished with a few sticks for hanging rags and tatters. The latter denotes the Musallat Shu'ayb, or praying-place of (prophet) Jethro; and here our Sayyid and our Shaykh took the opportunity of applying for temporal and eternal blessings. The height at the edge of the precipice which, cliffing to the north, showed a view of our camp and of Yubú and Shu'shú' Islands, was in round numbers 450 feet (aner. 29.40--28.94). From this vantage-ground we could distinctly trace the line of the Wady Makná, beginning in a round basin at the western foot of the northern Shigd Mountain and its sub-range; while low rolling hills, along which we were to travel, separated it from the Wady Bada'-‘Afál to the south. Two other important sets of catacombs, which I will call the "buttressed caves," are pierced in the right flank of the same gorge, at the base of a little conical hill, quaintly capped with a finial of weathered rock. The material is the normal silicious gravel-grit, traversed and cloisonné by dykes of harder stone. Beginning at the south, we find a range of three, facing eastward and separated from one another by flying buttresses of natural rock. No. 1 has a window as well as a door. Next to it is a square with six open loculi ranged from north to south. No. 3 shows a peculiarity--two small pilasters of the rudest (Egyptian?) Doric, the only sign of ornamentation found inside the tombs; a small break in the south-western wall connects it with the northernmost loculus of No. 2. Furthest north are three bevel-holes, noting the beginning of a catacomb; and round the northern flank of the detached cone are six separate caves, all laid waste by the furious northern gales.