bare for a certain
space; and the Israelites were thus able to cross during the night from
one side of the sea to the other. As morning dawned, Menephthah, once
more carefully guarding his own person, sent his chariots in pursuit.
The force entered on the slippery and dangerous ground, and advanced
half-way; but its progress was slow; the chariot-wheels sank into the
soft ooze, the horses slipped and floundered; all was disorder and
confusion. Before the troops could extricate themselves, the waters
returned on either hand; a high flow of the tide, the necessary
consequence of a low ebb, brought In the whelming flood from the
south-east; a strong wind from the Mediterranean, drove down upon them
the pent up waters of the Bitter Lakes from the north-west. The channel,
which had lately been dry land, became once more sea, and the entire
force that had entered it in pursuit of the Israelites perished. Safe on
the opposite shore, the Israelites saw the utter destruction of their
adversaries, whose dead bodies, driven before the gale, were cast up in
hundreds upon the coast where they sate encamped (Ex. xiv. 30).

The disaster paralyzed the monarch, and he made no further effort. If
the loss was not great numerically, it affected the most important arm
of the service, and it was the destruction of the very _elite_ of the
Egyptian troops. It was a blow in which the anger of the Egyptian gods
may well have been seen by some, while others may have regarded it as a
revelation of the incompetence of the monarch. The blow seems to have
been followed, within a short time, by revolt. Menephthah's last
monumental year is his eighth. A pretender to the crown arose in a
certain Amon-mes, or Amon-meses, who contested the throne with Seti II.,
Menephthah's son, and succeeded in establishing himself as king; but for
many years there raged in Egypt, as so often happens when a state is
suddenly weakened, civil war, bloodshed, and confusion.

The two dynasties that have last occupied us constitute the most
brilliant period of Egyptian architecture; for, as Fergusson, the latest
historian of architecture, has said, the hall of Seti at Karnak is "the
greatest of man's architectural works," the building to which it belongs
is "the noblest effort of architectural magnificence ever produced by
the hand of man," and the rock-cut temple of Ipsambul is "the finest of
its class known to exist anywhere." These works combine enormous mass
and size wit