[Illustration:  231.jpg THE FACADE OF THE LITTLE SPEOS OF HAUTHOR AT ABU SIMBEL]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the plates in Champollion.

A third excavated grotto of modest dimensions served as an accessory chamber to the two others.  An inexhaustible stream of yellow sand poured over the great temple from the summit of the cliff, and partially covered it every year.  No sooner were the efforts to remove it relaxed, than it spreads into the chambers, concealing the feet of the colossi, and slowly creeping upwards to their knees, breasts, and necks; at the beginning of this century they were entirely hidden.  In spite of all that was done to divert it, it ceaselessly reappeared, and in a few summers regained all the ground which had been previously cleared.  It would seem as if the desert, powerless to destroy the work of the conqueror, was seeking nevertheless to hide it from the admiration of posterity.*

     * The English engineers have succeeded in barring out the
     sand, and have prevented it from pouring over the cliff any
     more.—­Ed.

Seti had worked indefatigably at Thebes, but the shortness of his reign prevented him from completing the buildings he had begun there.  There existed everywhere, at Luxor, at Karnak, and on the left bank of the Nile, the remains of his unfinished works; sanctuaries partially roofed in, porticoes incomplete, columns raised to merely half their height, halls as yet imperfect with blank walls, here and there covered with only the outlines in red and black ink of their future bas-reliefs, and statues hardly blocked out, or awaiting the final touch of the polisher.*

* This is the description which Ramses gave of the condition in which he found the Memnonium of Abydos.  An examination of the inscriptions existing in the Theban temples which Seti I. had constructed, shows that it must have applied also to the appearance of certain portions of Qurneh, Luxor, and Karnak in the time of Ramses II.

Ramses took up the work where his father had relinquished it.  At Luxor there was not enough space to give to the hypostyle hall the extension which the original plans proposed, and the great colonnade has an unfinished appearance.

[Illustration:  230.jpg COLUMNS OF TEMPLE AT LUXOR]

The Nile, in one of its capricious floods, had carried away the land upon which the architects had intended to erect the side aisles; and if they wished to add to the existing structure a great court and a pylon, without which no temple was considered complete, it was necessary to turn the axis of the building towards the east.

[Illustration:  233.jpg THE CHAPEL OF THUTMOSIS III.  AND ONE OF THE PYLONS OF RAMSES II.  AT LUXOR]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Beato.