However, the vast size of the figures on the front of the propylaea of Edfou does certainly, in spite of their awkwardness, produce an imposing effect, especially at the time we first beheld them, when the gray twilight had descended upon the earth, and night was already thickening beneath the heavy portico.  We walked, or rather slid, down into the great court.  It was surrounded with massive columns loaded with ornament, and looked grave in the extreme, in spite of the heaps of rubbish that encumbered it, and enabled us to ascend to the summit of the colonnade at one corner.  The architecture of the Egyptians was certainly sublime.  Their style anticipated and surpassed the Gothic in majesty, though certainly not in beauty.  Their massive walls, Cyclopean columns, dim porticos, gloomy chambers, produce even now all the terrific impressions they could have desired.  Perhaps the crumbling ruins which encumber the roof, the wretched remains of Christian buildings once erected on this temple as on a rock for security, rather heighten than diminish its effect.  We walked round a vast wall still in perfect preservation, which encircles the windowless parallelogram formed by the temple, and reaches about half its height, leaving a narrow court like a moat all round; and we felt that these religious edifices had been fortresses likewise, and that temporal as well as spiritual terrors had of yore surrounded them.  When shall we be able to wring forth the secret of that ancient time?  When will its history cease to be a myth, its kings become real personages, its civilisation something better than a romance?  As yet, nothing has been discovered except a string of disjointed facts, which scholars arrange each after his own fashion, and which no more resemble any other known series of human actions than the accidental combination of the kaleidoscope does this living and breathing world.  We want a key, and a key has not been found.  So men go stumbling on through the inextricable labyrinth, and exhaust more ingenuity in vain speculations than would suffice to bring a variety of modern sciences to perfection.

It was perfectly safe to indulge in these thoughts, because even if any mighty antiquary had been at hand, he would have been obliged to confess that although some truth may have been brought to light, it is impossible to put one’s finger upon it.  For almost all men who have studied Egyptian antiquities differ entirely in their conclusions—­all arrange dynasties in a different manner, and find more mistakes than discoveries in their predecessors.  Well, thought we, let us leave them to their researches:  if they do not find the pot of gold, they may cultivate the ground.  For our part, we will hasten on to where yon pale gleam of yellow light is pouring between the propylaea and the body of the temple over the court-yard upon an enormous mountain of rubbish.  It was the moon that had risen—­not to enlighten the scene, but to render it more dim and mysterious,