ged to extract some sign of recognition. It
twittered, it posed itself in the golden air, with its bright eyes
fixed upon those eyes of stone which gazed beyond it, beyond the land of
Egypt, beyond the world of men, beyond the centre of the sun to the last
verges of eternity. And presently it alighted on the head of the Sphinx,
then on its ear, then on its breast; and over the breast it tripped
jerkily, with tiny, elastic steps, looking upward, its whole body
quivering apparently with a desire for comprehension--a desire for some
manifestation of friendship. Then suddenly it spread its wings, and,
straight as an arrow, it flew away over the sands and the waters toward
the doura-fields and Cairo.

And the sunset waned, and the afterglow flamed and faded, and the clear,
soft African night fell. The pilgrims who day by day visit the Sphinx,
like the bird, had gone back to Cairo. They had come, as the bird
had come; as those who have conquered Egypt came; as the Greeks came,
Alexander of Macedon, and the Ptolemies; as the Romans came; as the
Mamelukes, the Turks, the French, the English came.

They had come--and gone.

And that enormous face, with the stains of stormy red still adhering
to its cheeks, grew dark as the darkness closed in, turned brown as a
fellah's face, as the face of that fellah who whispered his secret in
the sphinx's ear, but learnt no secret in return; turned black almost
as a Nubian's face. The night accentuated its appearance of terrible
repose, of super-human indifference to whatever might befall. In the
night I seemed to hear the footsteps of the dead--of all the dead
warriors and the steeds they rode, defiling over the sand before the
unconquerable thing they perhaps thought that they had conquered. At
last the footsteps died away. There was a silence. Then, coming down
from the Great Pyramid, surely I heard the light patter of a donkey's
feet. They went to the Sphinx and ceased. The silence was profound.
And I remembered the legend that Mary, Joseph, and the Holy Child once
halted here on their long journey, and that Mary laid the tired Christ
between the paws of the Sphinx to sleep. Yet even of the Christ the soul
within that body could take no heed at all.

It is, I think, one of the most astounding facts in the history of
man that a man was able to contain within his mind, to conceive, the
conception of the Sphinx. That he could carry it out in the stone is
amazing. But how much more amazin