The porticos and façades present double and triple rows of columns, but seldom are they found on the sides or around the temples, as at Damascus and Tadmor. The circular arenas in the city, which I have described in a former letter, were not temples but colonnades, and these column-inclosed squares are the introduction of Queen Amense, and are only found at On. Usually the great lines of Egyptian edifices are straight, and their temples are quadrangles, with avenues of mighty columns extending from pylon to pylon in a succession of inner courts--these series of vast and magnificent vestibules sometimes extending half a mile, their avenues bordered by sphinxes and columns alternately, until the great fane of the temple, to which they are the approach, is reached. For columns, I have seen in the temple of the sacred ox--MNEVIS, colossal figures of Osiris, or of sovereigns with the attributes of Osiris. These Osiride pillars are often thirty feet in height. Upon my mind they produce an unpleasing effect. The impression is as if the god was brought into the service of man as a slave, to uphold his temples, though I believe they do not bear any portion of the superincumbent weight. But one cannot behold a row of these mighty men of stone without an emotion of awe. The general tone of the temples and palaces betrays the pyramid as their type. The walls sloping on the outside as if the lower section of a pyramid, give to the edifices of Egypt that expression of self-reposing and immovable stability which belongs to the pyramidal form. The whole effect is in the highest degree sublime, and at once subdues and elevates my mind as I gaze. The scale of architecture is so vast, that even the innumerable sculptured objects by which walls, columns, and entablatures are covered, do not interfere with the grandeur of the whole effect. Moreover, the heaviness which would adhere to such massive edifices in Syria, disappears when they are seen through the crystalline medium of this Egyptian atmosphere.