Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/230



are their palaces? is a question often asked in perplexity by those who find themselves for the first time among the remains of Ancient Egypt. They built both their tombs and their temples for eternity. Yet of their earthly houses, stately and splendid as the abodes of, at any rate, the greater and prouder of the Egyptian kings must have been, not a trace remains. We not only know not how or where the Royal builders of the Pyramids lived while their wretched slaves were toiling on the sands of Ghizeh, but we are as little able to fix the habitations of the much later monarchs who raised or added to that gigantic pillar forest at Karnak, or who carved the colossi on the rock-face