his royal master, i.e. Amenhotep or Amen-hept, declares in the exultation of his heart:  “I immortalized the name of the king, and no one has done the like of me in my works.  I executed two portrait-statues of the king, astonishing for their breadth and height; their completed form dwarfed the temple tower—­forty cubits was their measure; they were cut in the splendid sandstone mountain on either side, the eastern and the western.  I caused to be built eight ships, whereon the statues were carried up the river; they were emplaced in their sublime temple; they will last as long as heaven.  A joyful event was it when they were landed at Thebes and raised up in their place.”

A peculiar and curious interest attaches to one—­the more eastern—­of the two statues.  It was known to the Romans of the early empire as “The Vocal Memnon,” and formed one of the chief attractions which drew travellers to Egypt, from the fact, which is quite indisputable, that at that time, for two centuries or perhaps more, it emitted in the early morning a musical sound, which was regarded as a sort of standing miracle.  The fact is mentioned by Strabo, Pliny the elder, Pausanias, Tacitus, Juvenal, Lucian, Philostratus, and others, and is recorded by a number of ear-witnesses on the lower part of the colossus itself in inscriptions which may be seen at the present day.  Amenhotep, identified by the idle fancy of some Greek or Roman scholar with the Memnon of Homer, son of Tithonus and The Dawn, who led an army of Ethiopians to the assistance of Priam of Troy against the Greeks, was regarded as a god, and to hear the sound was not only to witness a miracle, but to receive an assurance of the god’s favourable regard.  For the statue did not emit a sound—­the god did not speak—­every day.  Sometimes travellers had to depart disappointed altogether, sometimes they had to make a second, a third, or a fourth visit before hearing the desired voice.  But still it was a frequent phenomenon; and a common soldier has recorded the fact on the base of the statue, that he heard it no fewer than thirteen times.  The origin of the sound, the time when it began to be heard, and the circumstances under which it ceased, are all more or less doubtful.  Some of those exceedingly clever persons who find priest-craft everywhere, think that the musical sound was the effect of human contrivance, and explain the whole matter to their entire satisfaction by “the jugglery of the priests.”  The priests either found a naturally vocal piece of rock, and intentionally made the statue out of it; or they cunningly introduced a pipe into the interior of the figure, by which they could make musical notes issue from the mouth at their pleasure.  It is against this view that in the palmy days of the Egyptian hierarchy, the vocal character of the statue was entirely unknown; we have no evidence of the sound having been heard earlier than the time of Strabo (B.C. 25-10), when Egypt was in the possession