Those noble ruins on the island of Philæ higher up the Nile above Assouan may no more be seen in all their glory. They have been sacrificed to the Nile god and to modern necessities. Realizing that the building of the great dam at Assouan would raise the level of the river and submerge the island, the builders went to enormous trouble to underpin the ruins and make them secure against the flood. This work was carried out with great difficulty, and in a masterly manner. The completion of the Assouan dam saw the waters of the Nile slowly creep over the ruined temples, and there may now be seen peeping above the surface of the water the tops of a few columns which, owing to their peculiar resemblance to a fourpost bed, are generally known as Pharaoh’s Bed. A wonderful work in a land of wonders is the barrage of Assouan, but the benefits that would accrue to the land by holding up and deflecting the waters of the Nile were not unrealized by the ancients. Thousands of years ago the problems of controlling the Nile were studied as carefully as they have been studied in our own time. One Pharaoh, known as Amenhotep III, ordered his engineers to work out a scheme for controlling the inundation. He desired to store up some of the Nile water when there was an excess, and draw on these surplus supplies when the river was low. The work he undertook was in its way as wonderful as that at Assouan, but when we consider that it was started nearly four thousand years ago it appears even more marvellous. Labourers swarmed over the land, cutting channels in the rock, and driving canals connected with the great expanse of water near Fayoum known as Lake Moeris, a natural reservoir which served to store the water just as the barrage at Assouan stores the water to-day. The Pharaoh had the foresight to tap this huge supply of water to irrigate the surrounding country, and the land, no longer at the mercy of the Nile floods, prospered accordingly. Amenhotep, like all the other Pharaohs, was anxious to protect his treasure from thieves, and he commanded his cleverest architects to design a palace in which people who went inside without permission might wander for ever without finding their way out again. The whole of the interior of the palace was composed of small rooms, in number three thousand, leading by narrow passages one into the other. The way in and out was a strict secret, and those who broke in might wander round and in and out of the chambers until they died of starvation. This palace was the famous Labyrinth, a maze in stone to defeat thieves and robbers. No trace of it now remains.