The working of the mines of Akiti had been the
source of considerable outlay at the beginning of the reign. The
measures taken by Seti to render the approaches to them practicable at
all seasons had not produced the desired results; as far back as the
IIIrd year of Ramses the overseers of the south had been forced to
acknowledge that the managers of the convoys could no longer use any of
the cisterns which had been hewn and built at such great expense. "Half
of them die of thirst, together with their asses, for they have no means
of carrying a sufficient number of skins of water to last during the
journey there and back." The friends and officers whose advice had been
called in, did not doubt for a moment that the king would be willing to
complete the work which his father had merely initiated. "If thou sayest
to the water, 'Come upon the mountain,' the heavenly waters will spring
out at the word of thy mouth, for thou art Ra incarnate, Khopri
visibly created, thou art the living image of thy father Tumu, the
Heliopolitan."--"If thou thyself sayest to thy father the Nile, father
of the gods," added the Viceroy of Ethiopia, "'Raise the water up to the
mountain,' he will do all that thou hast said, for so it has been with
all thy projects which have been accomplished in our presence, of which
the like has never been heard, even in the songs of the poets." The
cisterns and wells were thereupon put into such a condition that the
transport of gold was rendered easy for years to come. The war with the
Khati had not suspended building and other works of public utility;
and now, owing to the establishment of peace, the sovereign was able
to devote himself entirely to them. He deepened the canal at Zalu; he
repaired the walls and the fortified places which protected the frontier
on the side of the Sinaitic Peninsula, and he built or enlarged the
strongholds along the Nile at those points most frequently threatened
by the incursions of nomad tribes. Ramses was the royal builder _par
excellence_, and we may say without fear of contradiction that, from the
second cataract to the mouths of the Nile, there is scarcely an edifice
on whose ruins we do not find his name. In Nubia, where the desert
approaches close to the Nile, he confined himself to cutting in the
solid rock the monuments which, for want of space, he could not build in
the open. The idea of the cave-temple must have occurred very early
to the Egyptians; they were accustom