We will read the account of the visit to Karnak as it was given by Frank and Fred in their letters and journals. Lest they should forget something, they wrote until a late hour in the evening, and declined the invitation of one of the consuls to attend a native dance at his house. They had quite enough of the dance at Keneh.
"We rode from Luxor to Karnak along a path through fields and across open spaces of uncultivated ground. There did not seem to be much of a road, and we were rather taken aback when told that there was once an avenue of sphinxes, six thousand feet long (the avenue, not the sphinxes), all the way from Luxor to Karnak. What a magnificent avenue it must have been, and wouldn't it have been fun to ride along it from one end to the other! As we approached Karnak we came upon a few of the sphinxes still in their places; there were just enough of them to show what the avenue might have been in the days of its glory, and we wondered if the like would ever be seen again. All the sphinxes are much broken, and those that we saw had the heads of rams. Frank suggests that you could hardly expect anything else when the temple was built to celebrate the exploits of Rameses the Great. (He worked hard on that joke, although it is so poor.)
ENTRANCE TO THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR.
"We came to the propylon, or gate-way, which consisted of two enormous towers, each of them large enough to make a temple. There were six of these entrances; and to show you on what a scale this temple was, please look at the figures. One of the peristyles was 370 feet long, 50 feet deep, and 140 feet high. Some of them have partly fallen, but the others are very well preserved.
"As we have said, when talking of the Pyramids and other things, if you don't like figures you can look them over, and then skip. We are going to pelt you with a few handfuls of them, as it is impossible to give even a faint idea of the extent of this Temple of Karnak without them.
APPROACH TO KARNAK FROM LUXOR.