At first sight the task seemed impossible, but they will achieve it in the end, even with their simple means, these fellah toilers, who sing as they labour at their incessant work of ants.

Soon the grand hypostyle will be freed from rubbish, and its columns, which even before seemed so tremendous, uncovered now to the base, have added another twenty feet to their height.

A number of colossal statues, which lay asleep beneath this shroud of earth and sand, have been brought back to the light, set upright again and have resumed their watch in the intimidating thoroughfares for a new period of quasi-eternity.

Year by year the town-mummy is being slowly exhumed by dint of prodigious effort; and is repeopled again by gods and kings who had been hidden for thousands of years![*] Year in, year out, the digging continues--deeper and deeper.

It is scarcely known to what depth the debris and the ruins descend.