o celebrate his victory over the Kheta, a tribe
of Syrians, living far away by the river Orontes in the north of the
Holy Land.

Two on each side of the temple doorway the statues sit, and between
them, in low relief, is the small figure of the god Harmakhis. Running
above, across them all, is an inscription, part of which signifies--

"I give to thee all life and strength."

Look up at it beyond those towering immovable heads, and from it again
to the rough cliff untouched by tool, and from that to the sky, now of
the purest, softest blue, hanging like a canopy above.

The high black doorway of the temple lies like a gash on the face of the
cliff, and on one day of the year the ray of light from the rising sun
falls through it clean as a shot arrow. The black-robed guardian has
been expecting us, he stands waiting, holding his staff of office, and
admits us to the interior. It is very dark, and even with the light of
the flickering candle he holds up it is difficult to make out those
great columns, each seventeen feet high, carved with an image of the god
Osiris. As for the deep-cut pictures everywhere on the walls we can only
get the merest glimpses of them. We pass on through several halls,
noting how the angles and lines are absolutely plumb and true, and come
to the innermost sanctuary, where we find the king again as one of four
seated statues, not very large, the other three being gods! That was the
idea Rameses had of his own importance!

Then it grows on us with increasing wonder that all this temple--the
walls, the columns, the statues--are cut out of the actual rock, and
that all the stone dislodged in the cutting must have been carried out
through that doorway. How was it achieved? The depth of the temple to
its farthest wall is one hundred and eighty-five feet, or almost three
times a cricket-pitch! Imagine this depth driven in to the rock and
cleared out to a great height without any machine power or modern tools!
And this was accomplished in the reign of one king. Rameses reigned some
sixty years, and his great victory over the Kheta was five years after
his coronation, so perhaps sixty years is the longest we can give for
the construction of the temple, and it was probably much less. The story
goes that in this great battle the king, cut off from his men and alone
in the midst of a hostile army, performed prodigies of valour; he slew
and hewed right and left until he sent the greater part of the