Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/520

 the ruins of three temples; and here have been discovered columns, obelisks, and the remarkable sphinxes which represent the type of the Hyksos, with their broad features, large nose, and prominent cheek-bones.

All these monuments were executed in materials far more costly than similar works in Upper Egypt. The building-stone for the temples was brought by Ramses II., not from the nummulitic or sandstone rocks lying nearest to the delta, but from the pink granite quarries of Assuan, on the southern frontier of the empire. But of these sumptuous edifices, whose remains lie strewn over the mound at San, nothing was respected by subsequent generations of builders, whether Romans, monks, Christians, or Arabs. Not one of the fourteen obelisks, the largest in all Egypt, has survived; while the colossi have been broken into small fragments und even ground to dust. Amongst the ruins, however, has been discovered the precious "Stone of San," a tri-lingual stele which might have revealed the mystery

of the hieroglyphics, had not Champollion and Young already found a clue to their interpretation in the "Rosetta Stone."

The enclosure surrounding the great temple is no less than 80 feet thick, and the modern observer may well ask how such a metropolis could have been raised in the midst of these half-submerged lands, these swamps, and quagmires, and saline depressions now skirting Lake Menzaleh. But the district seems to have undoubtedly undergone vast changes since the oldest recorded times, changes which should probably be attributed to local subsidence.

Although the less copious of the two Nilotic branches enclosing the delta, that of Damietta is utilised to a far greater extent for irrigation purposes, thanks to the higher level of its bed. Along its course are situated some large towns,ewhile in many places numerous villages form an almost continuous city. Benha-l'-Assal, or the "City of Honey," which supplies the inhabitants of Cairo with considerable