The peculiar plan and other remarkable characteristics of this temple are well known.  Its great terraces, with the ramps leading up to them, flanked by colonnades, which, as we have seen, were imitated from the design of the old XIth Dynasty temple at its side, are familiar from a hundred illustrations, and the marvellously preserved colouring of its delicate reliefs is known to every winter visitor to Egypt, and can be realized by those who have never been there through the medium of Mr. Howard Carter’s wonderful coloured reproductions, published in Prof.  Naville’s edition of the temple by the Egypt Exploration Fund.  The Great Temple stands to-day clear of all the debris which used to cover it, a lasting monument to the work of the greatest of the societies which busy themselves with the unearthing of the relics of the ancient world.

[Illustration:  334.jpg THE TWO TEMPLES OF DES EL-BAHARI.] Excavated by Prof.  Nayille, 1893-8 and 1903-6, for the Egypt Exploration Fund

The two temples of Der el-Bahari will soon stand side by side, as they originally stood, and will always be associated with the name of the society which rescued them from oblivion, and gave us the treasures of the royal tombs at Abydos.  The names of the two men whom the Egypt Exploration Fund commissioned to excavate Der el-Bahari and Abydos, and for whose work it exclusively supplied the funds, Profs.  Naville and Petrie, will live chiefly in connection with their work at Der el-Bahari and Abydos.

The Egyptians called the two temples Tjeserti, “the two holy places,” the new building receiving the name of Tjeser-tjesru, “Holy of Holies,” and the whole tract of Der el-Bahari the appellation Tjesret, “the Holy.”  The extraordinary beauty of the situation in which they are placed, with its huge cliffs and rugged hillsides, may be appreciated from the photograph which is taken from a steep path half-way up the cliff above the Great Temple.  In it we see the Great Temple in the foreground with the modern roofs of two of its colonnades, devised in order to protect the sculptures beneath them, the great trilithon gate leading to the upper court, and the entrance to the cave-shrine of Amen-Ra, with the niches of the kings on either side, immediately at the foot of the cliff.  In the middle distance is the duller form of the XIth Dynasty temple, with its rectangular platform, the ramp leading up to it, and the pyramid in the centre of it, surrounded by pillars, half-emerging from the great heaps of sand and debris all around.  The background of cliffs and hills, as seen in the photograph, will serve to give some idea of the beauty of the surroundings,—­an arid beauty, it is true, for all is desert.  There is not a blade of vegetation near; all is salmon-red in colour beneath a sky of ineffable blue, and against the red cliffs the white temple stands out in vivid contrast.

The second illustration gives a nearer view of the great trilithon gate in the upper court, at the head of the ramp.  The long hill of Dra’ Abu-’l-Negga is seen bending away northward behind the gate.