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155and of the Oracle which is in Egypt I have made mention often before this, and now I will give an account of it, seeing that it is worthy to be described. This Oracle which is in Egypt is sacred to Leto, and it is established in a great city near that mouth of the Nile which is called Sebennytic, as one sails up the river from the sea; and the name of this city where the Oracle is found is Buto, as I have said before in mentioning it. In this Buto there is a temple of Apollo and Artemis; and the temple-house[134] of Leto, in which the Oracle is, is both great in itself and has a gateway of the height of ten fathoms: but that which caused me most to marvel of the things to be seen there, I will now tell. There is in this sacred enclosure a house of Leto made of one single stone as regards both height and length, and of which all the walls are in these two directions equal, each being forty cubits; and for the covering in of the roof there lies another stone upon the top, the cornice measuring four cubits.[135]
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Notes
[134] {neos}.
[135] I understand that each wall consisted of a single stone, which gave the dimensions each way: "as regards height and length" therefore it was made of a single stone. That it should have been a monolith, except the roof, is almost impossible, not only because of the size mentioned (which in any case is suspicious), but because no one would so hollow out a monolith that it would be necessary afterwards to put on another stone for the roof. The monolith chamber mentioned in ch. 175, which it took three years to convey from Elephantine, measured only 21 cubits by 14 by 8. The {parorophis} or "cornice" is not an "eave projecting four cubits," but (as the word is explained by Pollux) a cornice between ceiling and roof, measuring in this instance four cubits in height and formed by the thickness of the single stone: see Letronne, Recherches pour servir, etc. p. 80 (quoted by Bähr).