A WINTER MIDNIGHT BEFORE THE GREAT SPHINX
A night wondrously clear and of a colour unknown to our climate; a place
of dreamlike aspect, fraught with mystery. The moon of a bright silver,
which dazzles by its shining, illumines a world which surely is no
longer ours; for it resembles in nothing what may be seen in other
lands. A world in which everything is suffused with rosy color beneath
the stars of midnight, and where granite symbols rise up, ghostlike and
motionless.
Is that a hill of sand that rises yonder? One can scarcely tell, for it
has as it were no shape, no outline; rather it seems like a great rosy
cloud, or some huge, trembling billow, which once perhaps raised itself
there, forthwith to become motionless for ever. . . . And from out this
kind of mummified wave a colossal human effigy emerges, rose-coloured
too, a nameless, elusive rose; emerges, and stares with fixed eyes and
smiles. It is so huge it seems unreal, as if it were a reflection cast
by some mirror hidden in the moon. . . . And behind this monster
face, far away in the rear, on the top of those undefined and gently
undulating sandhills, three apocalyptic signs rise up against the sky,
those rose-coloured triangles, regular as the figures of geometry, but
so vast in the distance that they inspire you with fear. They seem to be
luminous of themselves, so vividly do they stand out in their clear
rose against the deep blue of the star-spangled vault. And this apparent
radiation from within, by its lack of likelihood, makes them seem more
awful.
And all around is the desert; a corner of the mournful kingdom of sand.
Nothing else is to be seen anywhere save those three awful things that
stand there upright and still--the human likeness magnified beyond all
measurement, and the three geometric mountains; things at first sight
like exhalations, visionary things, with nevertheless here and there,
and most of all in the features of the vast mute face, subtleties
of shadow which show that _it_ at least exists, rigid and immovable,
fashioned out of imperishable stone.
Even had we not known, we must soon have guessed, for these things are
unique in the world, and pictures of every age have made the knowledge
of them commonplace: the Sphinx and the Pyramids! But what is strange is
that they should be so disquieting. . . . And this pervading colour of
rose, whence comes it, seeing that usually the moon tints with blue the
things it illumines? One would not expect this colour either, which,
nevertheless, is that of all the sands and all the granites of Egypt and
Arabia. And then too, the eyes of the statue, how often have we not seen
them? And did we not know that they were capable only of their one fixed
stare? Why is it then that their motionless regard surprises and chills
us, even while we are obsessed by the smile of the sealed lips that seem
to hold back the answer to the supreme enigma? . . .
It is cold, but cold as in our country are the fine nights of January,
and a wintry mist rises low down in the little valleys of the sand. And
that again we were not expecting; beyond question the latest invaders of
this country, by changing the course of the old Nile, so as to water the
earth and make it more productive, have brought hither the humidity
of their own misty isle. And this strange cold, this mist, light as it
still is, seem to presage the end of ages, give an added remoteness
and finality to all this dead past, which lies here beneath us in
subterranean labyrinths haunted by a thousand mummies.
And the mist, which, as the night advances, thickens in the valleys,
hesitates to mount to the great daunting face of the Sphinx; and covers
it with the merest and most transparent gauze; and, like everything
else here to-night, this gauze, too, is rose-colored. And meanwhile the
Sphinx, which has seen the unrolling of all the history of the world,
attends impassively the change in Egypt's climate, plunged in profound
and mystic contemplation of the moon, its friend for the last 5000
years.
Here and there on the soft pathway of the sandhills are pigmy figures
of men that move about or sit squatting as if on the watch; and small
as they are, low down in the hollows and far away, this wonderful silver
moon reveals even their slightest gestures; for their white robes
and black cloaks stand sharply out against the monotonous rose of the
desert. At times they call to one another in a harsh, aspirate tongue,
and then go off at a run, noiselessly, barefooted, with burnous flying,
like moths in the night. They lie in wait for the parties of tourists
who arrive from time to time. For the great symbols, during the hundreds
and thousands of years that have elapsed since men ceased to venerate
them, have nevertheless scarcely ever been alone, especially on nights
with a full moon. Men of all races, of all times, have come to wander
round them, vaguely attracted by their immensity and mystery. In
the days of the Romans they had already become symbols of a lost
significance, legacies of a fabulous antiquity, but people came
curiously to contemplate them, and tourists in toga and in peplus carved
their names on the granite of their bases for the sake of remembrance.
The tourists who have come to-night, and upon whom have pounced the
black-cloaked Bedouin guides, wear cap and ulster or furred greatcoat;
their intrusion here seems almost an offence; but, alas, such visitors
become more numerous in each succeeding year. The great town hard
by--which sweats gold now that men have started to buy from it its
dignity and its soul--is become a place of rendezvous and holiday
for the idlers and upstarts of the whole world. 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. And the Bedouin guides, who a moment
ago seemed to flutter about the giant monument like so many black
moths--they too have gone, made restless by the cold air, which
erstwhile they had not known. The show for to-night is over, and
everywhere silence reigns.
The rosy tint fades on the Sphinx and the pyramids; all things in the
ghostly scene grow visibly paler; for the moon as it rises becomes
more silvery in the increasing chilliness of midnight. The winter mist,
exhaled from the artificially watered fields below, continues to rise,
takes heart and envelops the great mute face itself. And the latter
persists in its regard of the dead moon, preserving still the old
disconcerting smile. It becomes more and more difficult to believe that
here before us is a real colossus, so surely does it seem nothing other
than a dilated reflection of a thing which exists _elsewhere_, in
some other world. And behind in the distance are the three triangular
mountains. Them, too, the fog envelops, till they also cease to exist,
and become pure visions of the Apocalypse.
Now it is that little by little an intolerable sadness is expressed
in those large eyes with their empty sockets--for, at this moment, the
ultimate secret, that which the Sphinx seems to have known for so many
centuries, but to have withheld in melancholy irony, is this: that all
these dead men and women who sleep in the vast necropolis below have
been fooled, and the awakening signal has not sounded for a single
one of them; and that the creation of mankind--mankind that thinks and
suffers--has had no rational explanation, and that our poor aspirations
are vain, but so vain as to awaken pity.