e sun rose, and a mournful one when it
set. It is also related that it shed tears, and gave out oracular
responses in seven verses, and that these sounds were heard till the
fourth century after Christ. These phenomena, attested by many ancient
and modern writers, are variously accounted for by the learned, as
priestcraft, peculiar construction, escape of rarified air, &c. This
statue is in excellent preservation. The head is of rose-colored
granite, and the rest of a kind of black stone. Two other colossal
statues, about fifty feet high, are seated on the plain.

HELIOPOLIS.

The name of Heliopolis, or City of the Sun, was given by the Greeks to
the Egyptian _City of On_. It was situated a little to the north of
Memphis, was one of the largest cities of Egypt during the reign of the
Pharaohs, and so adorned with statues as to be esteemed one of the first
sacred cities in the kingdom. The temple dedicated to Re, was a
magnificent building, having in front an avenue of sphynxes, celebrated
in history, and adorned with several obelisks, raised by Sethosis
Rameses, B.C. 1900. By means of lakes and canals, the town, though built
on an artificial eminence, communicated with the Nile, and during the
flourishing ages of the Egyptian monarchy, the priests and scholars
acquired and taught the elements of learning within the precincts of its
temples. At the time of Strabo who visited this town about A. D. 45,
the apartments were still shown in which, four centuries before, Eudoxus
and Plato had labored to learn the philosophy of Egypt. Here Joseph and
Mary are said to have rested with our Saviour. A miserable village,
called _Metarea_, now stands on the site of this once magnificent city.
Near the village is the _Pillar of On_, a famous obelisk, supposed to be
the oldest monument of the kind existing. Its height is 671/2 feet, and
its breadth at the base 6 feet. It is one single shaft of reddish
granite (Sienite), and hieroglyphical characters are rudely sculptured
upon it.

MEMPHIS.

The very situation of this famous ancient city of Egypt had long been a
subject of learned dispute, till it was accurately ascertained by the
French expedition to Egypt. Numerous heaps of rubbish, of blocks of
granite covered with hieroglyphics and sculptures, of colossal
fragments, scattered over a space three or four leagues in
circumference, marks its site, a few miles south of Metarea or
Heliopolis, at a village called Monie