* 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.
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.