EXCAVATIONS AT ABYDOS—NAVILLE. 583 
construction which is in front of that room is neither a sanctuary 
nor a tomb; it is a great reservoir, or, if you wish to call it so, a pool, 
the word being understood in the same sense as when we speak of 
the pool of Bethesda. 
I recall that we found ourselves in a rectangular space of 30 by 20 
meters, inclosed by a wall 6 meters thick, the outer face of the wall 
of limestone and the inner face of very hard, red sandstone. This 
space is divided into three naves, the two on the sides being narrower 
than the center one. These naves are separated by colonnades made 
of enormous pillars of granite supporting architraves equally massive. 
The two lateral naves had a ceiling, a corner of which is still standing; 
as for the middle nave, that is more doubtful. 
All around this inclosure there are parallel cells in which a man can 
stand upright, closed in probably by wooden doors and which are 
without any ornament. It seemed at first sight quite certain that 
these cells opened on a pavement and that the entire building had a 
flooring. Great was our astonishment when we discovered that in 
front of these cells there was no flooring but only a footpath a little 
more than 60 centimeters wide which extended all around the edifice, 
passing before the large entrance door, and which ran also along the 
side of each nave opposite the doors of thesecells. This wall of magni- 
ficent masonry continues beneath the pathway and at a depth of 
nearly 4 meters we discovered infiltration water at the level where it is 
encountered in cultivated land, although we are in the desert. 
Thus the two large lateral naves and the contiguous extremities of 
the middle one form a great rectangular basin bordered on two sides 
by a stone path which might have served as a towpath for hauling 
the boats or canoes in the basin and which stopped, perhaps, before 
the cells. 
The middle nave was larger and contained no waterexcept at its ends. 
From each side the stone forming the footpath, which is an enormous 
block, passes between the pillars or supports them and advances 
almost to the middle of the nave to that which at first sight appeared 
to be a narrow canal, a little more than a meter and a half wide. 
While digging in this canal we came to two stairways, turned, one 
toward the front entrance the other toward the funeral chamber of 
Osiris. We had a great deal of trouble excavating in this middle 
nave covered with enormous stones that we were obliged to remove, 
but it is clear from the arrangement of the place that the entire central 
gallery was an island reached by a wooden bridge or by boat. The 
end of one of these staircases that we have been able to clear stops 
about a meter above the water. If we were in a normal year instead 
of a year when the water is exceptionally low, the staircase would 
reach the water and, according to the conditions of the season, the 
first two or three steps even might be mundated. 
