There are fine architraves, and some bits of
roofing, but the greater part is open to the air. Through a doorway is
a second hall containing columns much less noble, and beyond this one
walks in ruin, among crumbled or partly destroyed chambers, broken
statues, become mere slabs of granite and fallen blocks of stone. At the
end is a wall, with a pavement bordering it, and a row of chambers that
look like monkish cells, closed by small doors. At Kom Ombos there
are two sanctuaries, one dedicated to Sebek, the other to Heru-ur, or
Haroeris, a form of Horus in Egyptian called "the Elder," which was
worshipped with Sebek here by the admirers of crocodiles. Each of them
contains a pedestal of granite upon which once rested a sacred bark
bearing an image of the deity.
There are some fine reliefs scattered through these mighty ruins,
showing Sebek with the head of a crocodile, Heru-ur with the head of
a hawk so characteristic of Horus, and one strange animal which has
no fewer than four heads, apparently meant for the heads of lions. One
relief which I specially noticed for its life, its charming vivacity,
and its almost amusing fidelity to details unchanged to-day, depicts
a number of ducks in full flight near a mass of lotus-flowers. I
remembered it one day in the Fayum, so intimately associated with Sebek,
when I rode twenty miles out from camp on a dromedary to the end of the
great lake of Kurun, where the sand wastes of the Libyan desert stretch
to the pale and waveless waters which, that day, looked curiously
desolate and even sinister under a low, grey sky.
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