istence, and when he surveys the tracings, and half-finished 

 sculpture he might almost look for the return of the artists to 

 complete their work. Such is the wonderful preservation of 

 these works in the fine blown sand of the great deserts, that al*- 

 though the buildings have been roofless for two thousand years, 

 the paintings are undefaced. " There are some small chambers 

 in a temple at Abydos" says Sir* F. Hennicker, " in which the 

 color of the painting is so well preserved that doubts immediate- 

 ly arise as to the length of time that it has been done. The best 

 works even of the Venetian school, betray their age; but the col- 

 ors here, which we are told were in existence two thousand years 

 before the time of Titian, are at this moment as fresh as if 

 they had not been laid on an hour." The preservation of works 

 usually esteemed as fugitive, being so perfect, we might expect 

 that those executed in more durable materials the sienite, granite, 

 basalt, and limestone, would be still more so, and we find frag- 

 ments of temples leveled to the ground by Cambyses, five hun- 

 dred years before the Christian Era still retaining their pristine 

 polish. The north and east faces of the obelisk, still erect among 

 the ruins of Alexandria, retain much of their original sharpness, 

 but the south and west sides have been entirely defaced by the 

 attrition of the minute particles, of sand with which the air is 

 charged, beating against them sixteen hundred years. The des- 

 olation brought upon those ancient cities by the irresistable en- 

 croachments of the desert, the remains of its immense temples 

 and works of art, its silent chambers, where the wrapped-up dead 

 hav^j remained for two hundred centuries, who once trode the 

 streets of ancient Thebes, with all the buoyancy of feeling and 

 all the hope which animates men now, furnishes a striking in- 

 stance of the influence of apparently insignificant causes,, in pro- 

 ducing the greatest results, and remind us of the prophet's decla- 

 ration, " Wo to the land shadowing with wings." But the an- 

 cient cities of Nubia, and Upper Egypt, are not the only places 

 buried in blown sand, there are numerous instances of towns 

 and villages, in England and France, thus overwhelmed. For 

 example, near St. Pol de Leon, in Brittany, a whole village was 

 tompletely buried beneath drift sand, so that nothing but the 



