The Modern Spirit Encompasses
The Old Desert Of The Sphinx On Every Side.
It is true that up to the
present no one has dared to profane it by building in the immediate
neighbourhood of the great statue.
Its fixity and calm disdain still
hold some sway, perhaps. But little more than a mile away there ends a
road travelled by hackney carriages and tramway cars, and noisy with
the delectable hootings of smart motor cars; and behind the pyramid of
Cheops squats a vast hotel to which swarm men and women of fashion,
the latter absurdly feathered, like Redskins at a scalp dance; and
sick people, in search of purer air; and consumptive English maidens;
and ancient English dames, a little the worse for wear, who bring
their rheumatisms for the treatment of the dry winds.
Passing on our way hither, we had seen this road and this hotel and
these people in the glare of the electric lights, and from an
orchestra that was playing there we caught the trivial air of a
popular refrain of the music halls; but when in a dip of the ground
all this had disappeared, what a sense of deliverance possessed us,
how far off this turmoil seemed! As soon as we commenced to tread upon
the sand of centuries, where all at once our footsteps made no sound,
nothing seemed to have existence, save only the great calm and the
religious awe of this world into which we were come, of this world
with its so crushing commentary upon our own, where all seemed silent,
undefined, gigantic and suffused with rose-colour.
And first there is the pyramid of Cheops, whose immutable base we had
to skirt on our way hither. In the moonlight we could see the separate
blocks, so enormous, so regular, so even in their layers, which lie
one above the other to infinity, getting ever smaller and smaller, and
mounting, mounting in diminishing perspective, until at last high up
they form the apex of this giddy triangle. And the pyramid seemed to
be illumined by some sad dawn of the end of the world, a dawn which
made ruddy only the sands and the granites of earth, and left the
heavens, pricked with their myriad stars, more awful in their
darkness. How impossible it is for us to conceive the mental attitude
of that king who, during some half-century, spent the lives of
thousands and thousands of his slaves in the construction of this
tomb, in the fond and foolish hope of prolonging to infinity the
existence of his mummy.
The pyramid once passed there was still a short way to go before we
confronted the Sphinx, in the middle of what our contemporaries have
left him of his desert. We had to descend the slope of that sandhill
which looked like a cloud, and seemed as if covered with felt, in
order to preserve in such a place a more complete silence. And here
and there we passed a gaping black hole - an airhole, as it seemed, of
the profound and inextricable kingdom of mummies, very populous still,
in spite of the zeal of the exhumers.
As we descended the sandy pathway we were not slow to perceive the
Sphinx itself, half hill, half couchant beast, turning its back upon
us in the attitude of a gigantic dog, that thought to bay the moon;
its head stood out in dark silhouette, like a screen before the light
it seemed to be regarding, and the lappets of its headgear showed like
downhanging ears. And then gradually, as we walked on, we saw it in
profile, shorn of its nose - flat-nosed like a death's head - but having
already an expression even when seen afar off and from the side;
already disdainful with thrust-out chin and baffling, mysterious
smile. And when at length we arrived before the colossal visage, face
to face with it - without however encountering its gaze, which passed
high above our heads - there came over us at once the sentiment of all
the secret thought which these men of old contrived to incorporate and
make eternal behind this mutilated mask.
But in full daylight their great Sphinx is no more. It has ceased as
it were to exist. It is so scarred by time, and by the hands of
iconoclasts; so dilapidated, broken and diminished, that it is as
inexpressive as the crumbling mummies found in the sarcophagi, which
no longer even ape humanity. But after the manner of all phantoms it
comes to life again at night, beneath the enchantments of the moon.
For the men of its time whom did it represent? King Amenemhat? The Sun
God? Who can rightly tell? Of all hieroglyphic images it remains the
one least understood. The unfathomable thinkers of Egypt symbolised
everything for the benefit of the uninitiated under the form of awe-
inspiring figures of the gods; and it may be, perhaps, that, after
having meditated so deeply in the shadow of their temples, and sought
so long the everlasting wherefore of life and death, they wished
simply to sum up in the smile of these closed lips the vanity of the
most profound of our human speculations. . . . It is said that the
Sphinx was once of striking beauty, when harmonious contour and
colouring animated the face, and it was enthroned at its full height
on a kind of esplanade paved with long slabs of stone. But was it then
more sovereign than it is to-night in its last decrepitude? Almost
buried beneath the sand of the Libyan desert, which now quite hides
its base, it rises at this hour like a phantom which nothing solid
sustains in the air.
*****
It has gone midnight. In little groups the tourists of the evening
have disappeared; to regain perhaps the neighbouring hotel, where the
orchestra doubtless has not ceased to rage; or may be, remounting
their cars, to join, in some club of Cairo, one of those bridge
parties, in which the really superior intellects of our time delight;
some - the stouthearted ones - departed talking loudly and with cigar in
mouth; others, however, daunted in spite of themselves, lowered their
voices as people instinctively do in church.
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