_Friday, 27th._--Such a morning as the evening of yesterday foreboded; rather chilly and misty, and as near an approach to winter as Upper Egypt may be expected to afford. The sky was veiled on all sides with soft grey clouds, wrinkled and fretted like the grey sands when the sea has left them. It was a fitting background to the desolate tombs of Beni Hassan, which I visited an hour or two after sunrise. The range of hills on the face of which these tombs are excavated is not unlike Gebel Aboofada in its configuration, except that the strata with which it is scored are more level and regular. This monotony is, however, relieved by the sky-line, which is extremely fine. Along the foot of these hills runs a level strip of barren land, broken abruptly in its whole length by a steep bank which rises like a ruined wall from the plain below, and which is, when the Nile is exceptionally high, the bank of the river itself. Standing, as it now does, nearly a mile inland, and crested with two deserted villages, it has a grand but uncanny aspect. I had long been eager to see the tombs, which show what is considered by many to be the first rudiment of the Doric order. The similarity, more striking even than I expected, is so great that, taken with our knowledge of the early and frequent intercourse of the Greeks with Egypt and of the assimilating power of their genius, it certainly offers a strong _prima facie_ presumption in favour of this view. It may be objected that the echinus, the conical form of the shaft and its entasis, all three inseparable features and especial beauties of the Greek order, are wanting here, though they are present in the earliest specimen of the style preserved in Greece, the temple of Corinth. This argument would deserve more consideration if it could be conceived that the order as seen at Corinth was a spontaneous conception, and not a development of some more elementary form which, whether native or imported at a remote period, has not been handed down to us. In point of fact, the chamfering of a simple stone pier into an octagon and then further to a polygon of sixteen, or more, sides (specimens of the two forms are seen side by side in two of the tombs of Beni Hassan) is so elementary an effort of architecture and one so obvious, that its independent and spontaneous adoption by two different nations would be matter for no surprise. On the other hand, it is to be remarked that these tombs and the early temple at Karnak already mentioned are the only instances of this style known in Africa--that not only are they isolated in themselves, but they form a step to no further developments--a link in no chain; that in character and conception they have nothing in common with any of the great monuments of Egypt, to which indeed they are antagonistic in