The well at this
station was renovated by Egypt's Prince Farouk in the 1930's, and the Roman
walls are now destroyed. Farouk quarried porphyry briefly, and used it to
provide Cairo's modern building entries with their distinctive purple lintels.
But his efforts lasted only long enough to relearn how hard the work was. Since
then, the only modern quarrier was one Lady Cowdray, wife of a Scottish oil
magnate, who had promised her husband he would be buried in a porphyry
sarcophagus—and so he was.