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 with a profusion of elaborate ornamentation.  Covering nearly as much ground as the greatest of the pyramids, and containing equally enormous blocks of stone, the Theban palace-temples unite a wealth of varied ornamentation almost unparalleled among the edifices erected by man.  Here are long avenues of sphinxes and colossi, leading to tall, tapering obelisks which shoot upwards like the pinnacles, towers, and spires of a modern cathedral, while beyond the obelisks are vistas of gateways and courts, of colonnades and pillared halls, that impress the beholder with a deep sense of the constructive imagination of the architect who could design them, no less than with admiration of the ruler whose resources were sufficient to make them realities.