irst emotion
of the traveller be adequately described as disappointment.
In such cases there is generally some profit in looking at the monument
a second time, or even at our own sensations a second time.
So I reasoned, striving with wild critics in the wilderness;
but the only part of the debate which is relevant here can
be expressed in the statement that I do think the Pyramid big,
for the deep and simple reason that it is bigger than I am.
I delicately suggested to those who were disappointed in the Sphinx
that it was just possible that the Sphinx was disappointed in them.
The Sphinx has seen Julius Caesar; it has very probably seen St. Francis,
when he brought his flaming charity to Egypt; it has certainly looked,
in the first high days of the revolutionary victories, on the face
of the young Napoleon. Is it not barely possible, I hinted
to my friends and fellow-tourists, that after these experiences,
it might be a little depressed at the sight of you and me?
But as I say, I only reintroduce my remarks in connection with a
greater matter than these dead things of the desert; in connection
with a tomb to which even the Pyramids are but titanic lumber,
and a presence greater than the Sphinx, since it is not only a riddle
but an answer.

Before I go on to deeper defences of any such cult or culture,
I wish first to note a sort of test for the first impressions
of an ordinary tourist like myself, to whom much that is really full
of an archaic strength may seem merely stiff, or much that really
deals with a deep devotional psychology may seem merely distorted.
In short I would put myself in the position of the educated
Englishman who does quite honestly receive a mere impression
of idolatry. Incidentally, I may remark, it is the educated
Englishman who is the idolater. It is he who only reverences
the place, and does not reverence the reverence for the place.
It is he who is supremely concerned about whether a mere object
is old or new, or whether a mere ornament is gold or gilt.
In other words, it is he who values the visible things rather
than the invisible; for no sane man can doubt that invisible things
are vivid to the priests and pilgrims of these shrines.

In the midst of emotions that have moved the whole world out
of its course, girt about with crowds who will die or do murder
for a definition, the educated English gentleman in his blindness
bows down to wood and stone. For the only thing wrong about th