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COLOSSI AND SPHYNX AT WADY SABOUA, NUBIA. 

   At Korosko, near Wady Saboua, I found one or two of the Pacha's steamers, and a considerable body of troops stationed. The Pacha had gone overland from Korosko to Khartoum, to meet Theodosius, the new "Emperor" of Abyssinia--an energetic and spirited man, who, after uniting under his power the petty hostile kingdoms into which this district has for centuries been divided, had so far threatened the southern provinces of Egypt, as to induce Said Pacha to meet him in conference, backed by about ten thousand soldiers.
   These potentates, as I afterwards learned, effected a meeting, and matters were understood to be amicably arranged. The Patriarch of the Coptic Church, being also the head of the Established Church of Abyssinia, was subsequently sent by Said Pacha as an ambassador to the court of Theodosius, who received him with much apparent distrust, and made a sort of state prisoner of him, keeping him strictly guarded in his own immediate train. Then, suddenly summoning all his chief men, he demanded of his prisoner, that if he were the Patriarch he professed to be, he should crown the Emperor, there and then, as the deputed head of his church in Abyssinia;  thus adding, by a stroke of wily policy worthy of a more civilised monarch, a most powerful support to his newly-acquired temporal dominion; for the reverence of the eastern churches for their supposed spiritual leaders is very great. The Coptic Patriarch, who is himself an unusually shrewd, intelligent, artful man, and a progressionist withal, was detained for many months at the court of Theodosius, without being able even to communicate with his anxious friends at Cairo. But he has at length been allowed to return, with a fund of anecdote and information as to the social and political condition of a country which bids fair, under the rule of Theodosius, to rise in the scale of nations almost as strangely and as rapidly as Egypt did under the able government of Mahommed Ali.
   At Korosko, the Nile, whose course is almost uniformly south, takes a sudden bend to the north-west, and in this bend, on the northern bank, are the temples of Amada and Wady Saboua. The former did not afford me a picture,-it is exceedingly plain externally, and almost entirely buried by the drifted sand. Its interior, however, contains some beautiful sculpture of the very early age of Osirtasin III., consequently more than 3500 years old. Even the colours are quite fresh in some places, having been preserved by the plastering of mud with which the early Christians concealed the emblems of idolatry. 
   Wady Saboua is thus described by Sir G. Wilkinson :-"Saboua, so called from the 'lions' (andro-sphynxes) of the dromos, is of the early time of Rameses the Great. It is all built of sandstone, with the exception of the adytum, which is excavated in the rock. The dromos was adorned with eight sphynxes on either side, and terminated by two statues with sculptured stelae at their back: to this succeeded the two pyramidal towers of the propylon; the area, with eight Osiridae figures attached to the pillars supporting the architraves and roofs of the lateral corridors; and the interior chambers, which are now closed by the drifted sand. Amunre and Re were the chief deities, and from the worship of the god of Thebes, the town bore the same name as that city - Amunei, or the abode of Amun."
   The reader will conjecture that the desolate figures which form my picture are the two statues which terminated the dromos, and some of the mutilated bodies of the androsphynxes. The pylon of the temple is rude, and very much dilapidated; and it appeared to me that these figures were most impressive, standing alone, as I have represented them, amidst the sultry stillness of the desert, whose remorseless sand-waves are gradually stealing round, and engulfing them.