One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx - a bird
like a swallow, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of blue
somewhere on its wings.
When I came to the edge of the sand basin
where perhaps Khufu saw it lying nearly four thousand years before the
birth of Christ, the Sphinx and the bird were quite alone. The bird
flew near the Sphinx, whimsically turning this way and that, flying
now low, now high, but ever returning to the magnet which drew it,
which held it, from which it surely longed 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.
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