39 deg..  It may easily be conceived that the difference of temperature between the subterraneous and the external air would attain its maximum about sunrise.”  Analogous phenomena occur among the sandstone rocks of El Nakous, in Arabia Petraea, near Mount Maladetta in the Pyrenees, and (perhaps) in the desert between Palestine and Egypt.  “On the fifth day of my journey,” says the accomplished author of ‘Eothen.’ “the sun growing fiercer and fiercer, ... as I drooped my head under his fire, and closed my eyes against the glare that surrounded me, I slowly fell asleep—­for how many minutes or moments I cannot tell—­but after a while I was gently awakened by a peal of church bells—­my native bells—­the innocent bells of Marlen that never before sent forth their music beyond the Blagdon hills!  My first idea naturally was that I still remained fast under the power of a dream.  I roused myself, and drew aside the silk that covered my eyes, and plunged my bare face into the light.  Then at least I was well enough awakened, but still those old Marlen bells rang on, not ringing for joy, but properly, prosily, steadily, merrily ringing ‘for church.’ After a while the sound died away slowly; it happened that neither I nor any of my party had a watch to measure the exact time of its lasting; but it seemed to me that about ten minutes had passed before the bells ceased."[22] The gifted writer proceeds to give a metaphysical explanation of the phenomena; but it may be questioned whether he did not hear actual musical sounds, emitted by the rocks that lay beneath the sands over which he was moving.

And similar sounds have been heard when the stones that sent them forth were quarried blocks, no longer in a state of nature, but shaped by human tools, and employed in architecture.  Three members of the French Expedition, MM.  Jomard, Jollois, and Devilliers, were together in the granite cell which forms the centre of the palace-temple of Karnak, when, according to their own account, they “heard a sound, resembling that of a chord breaking, issue from the blocks at sunrise.”  Exactly the same comparison is employed by Pausanias to describe the sound that issued from “the vocal Memnon.”

On the whole, we may conclude that the musical qualities of his remarkable colossus were unknown alike to the artist who sculptured the monument and to the king whom it represented.  To them, in its purpose and object, it belonged, not to Music, but wholly to the sister art of Architecture.  “The Pair” sat at one extremity of an avenue leading to one of the great palace-temples reared by Amenhotep III.—­a palace-temple which is now a mere heap of sandstone, “a little roughness in the plain.”  The design of the king was, that this grand edifice should be approached by a dromos or paved way, eleven hundred feet long, which should be flanked on either side by nine similar statues, placed at regular intervals along the road, and all representing himself.  The egotism of the monarch may perhaps be excused on account of the grandeur of his idea, which we nowhere else find repeated, avenues of sphinxes being common in Egypt, and avenues of sitting human life-size figures not unknown to Greece, but the history of art containing no other instance of an avenue of colossi.