Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/134



the edge of the Libyan wilderness, about a bowshot to the east of the line "that just divides the desert from the sown," their backs turned to the mountain and their faces to the river, sit and have sat for more than thirty centuries the two Colossi of Amenophis. Of the temple that they once guarded scarce a vestige remains—only the stele recording the pompous titles of the royal templebuilder, and commending him and his work to an immortality which the great fane whose very ground-plan is now lost has done nothing to preserve. Nature herself has undergone a change in the course of these three thousand years, and Tama and Shama, as the Arabs call them, once high and dry at all