The porticos and façades present double and triple rows of columns, but seldom are they found on the sides or around the temples, as at Damascus and Tadmor. The circular arenas in the city, which I have described in a former letter, were not temples but colonnades, and these column-inclosed squares are the introduction of Queen Amense, and are only found at On. Usually the great lines of Egyptian edifices are straight, and their temples are quadrangles, with avenues of mighty columns extending from pylon to pylon in a succession of inner courts--these series of vast and magnificent vestibules sometimes extending half a mile, their avenues bordered by sphinxes and columns alternately, until the great fane of the temple, to which they are the approach, is reached.
For columns, I have seen in the temple of the sacred ox--MNEVIS, colossal figures of Osiris, or of sovereigns with the attributes of Osiris. These Osiride pillars are often thirty feet in height. Upon my mind they produce an unpleasing effect. The impression is as if the god was brought into the service of man as a slave, to uphold his temples, though I believe they do not bear any portion of the superincumbent weight. But one cannot behold a row of these mighty men of stone without an emotion of awe. The general tone of the temples and palaces betrays the pyramid as their type. The walls sloping on the outside as if the lower section of a pyramid, give to the edifices of Egypt that expression of self-reposing and immovable stability which belongs to the pyramidal form. The whole effect is in the highest degree sublime, and at once subdues and elevates my mind as I gaze. The scale of architecture is so vast, that even the innumerable sculptured objects by which walls, columns, and entablatures are covered, do not interfere with the grandeur of the whole effect. Moreover, the heaviness which would adhere to such massive edifices in Syria, disappears when they are seen through the crystalline medium of this Egyptian atmosphere.
There is another peculiarity, my dear mother, of Egyptian architecture, which no one can contemplate without an increasing impression of awe. I allude to the dromos, or double row of sphinxes--figures of which I have already spoken, and of which we have no idea in Syria, though an Assyrian noble whom I met in Sidon, described to me reposing colossi with majestic heads of kings and bodies of lions, as guarding the approach to the temples of the gods of his country. Such mysterious compounds of the human form with a lion or a ram, denoting the union of intellect with strength, are to be encountered here before every temple. These avenues of sphinxes, in profound repose and with a grave and serious aspect, are usually entered through a lofty gateway or pylon, before which are seated gigantic figures of gods, or stand obelisks of granite, placed in pairs, and richly and elaborately sculptured with hieroglyphics. Through such a gateway and avenue, I approached the city of On. A day or two ago I was in a temple dedicated to the god Horus, son of Osiris and Isis. Upon the pylon was inscribed a sun, supported by two asps with outspread wings--the emblem of Hor-hat, the good genius of Egypt--and hence to be found everywhere represented. It is this which is erroneously called, by some travellers, a winged globe. In the entrance, this god was pictured with the head of a hawk (at once his symbol and a type of the sun, from the piercing brightness of its eye), as an actor in various scenes, both celestial and terrestrial, such as hunting, sailing, and engaged in war against Typhon, and others.