Luxor, as a whole, is better preserved than Karnak. I suppose the heaped-up débris kept the columns in position during the last ten or a dozen centuries. I wish it had been there when the early Christian came along. Cambyses of Persia, who burned everything that would burn in Egypt, about 527 B.C., blackened the walls of this temple with fire, the marks of which show to this day, but he was nothing to the followers of Queen Helena. Even the guide-book, which is likely to be conservative in any comment that may touch upon the faith of its readers, says concerning the followers of Helena: "Not content with turning certain sections of it into churches, the more fanatical among them smashed statues, and disfigured bas-reliefs and wrecked shrines with characteristic savage and ignorant zeal."[7] There ought to be a painting or a marble group somewhere entitled "Early Christian at Work"--a lean-faced, stringy-haired maniac with sledge, murdering a symbolized figure of Defenceless Art in the Far East. The early Christian is said to have destroyed forty-five thousand statues in Thebes in one day. Still, those statues may not matter so much--they were probably all of Rameses the Great, and there are enough of him left. The Luxor Temple had them in all sizes, and of all materials, from granite to alabaster. Also some of "Mrs. Rameses," as Gaddis called her--no particular Mrs. Rameses--there having been several of her; just a sort of generic type of connubial happiness, I suppose. Mrs. Rameses, by the way, does not cut much figure in the statuary. She usually comes only about to the knee of the King, though she is life-size even then, for his own statues are colossal, ranging anywhere from fifteen to fifty feet high. That was to represent their difference in importance, of course, an idea which the women members of our party seemed to disapprove.[8] One of the statues of Rameses was found in a curious manner. A guide only a little while ago was lecturing to a party of tourists, while a young lady not far away was sketching a corner of the ruin. The sketcher stopped to listen to the guide's talk, and when he had finished said to the boy who was keeping the flies from her: "Go up on that heap of rubbish and see what that stone is." It was the rubbish that slopes down from the old mosque. The boy climbed up, pulled away the trash, and uncovered the head of one of the most perfect Rameseses yet discovered.