Sphinx

“ His every attitude was a symbol, and all his features became in quick succession types of thought and exponents of hidden feelings, while his inquisitive nose stood forth in the midst of their ceaseless play like a perpetual interrogation point that would have electrified the Sphinx into life, and set its stone lips gabbling answers and explanations. ”

“ Hundreds of years after I am dead the Sphinx would be probably as it is now—silent, grave, crouching there under the scorching sun, its eyes of stone gazing beyond the world of men, and seeming for ever to be smiling ironically on the folly of human vanities and aspirations. ”

“ Sphinx, she had haunted his thoughts that Indian night as he had walked back from her palace, carrying with him her image, white and stately in the flash of her diamonds and the green fires of her emeralds ... the great lady, who knew the value of her smiles and gave the largess but with condescension. Sphinx she was even more to him now, whether hurrying from her walk to receive him, wide-eyed in the firelight, with the bloom of a girl on her cheek and an exquisite gracious timidity ”

“ It is with the utmost elegance added in the fable, that when Sphinx was conquered, her carcass was laid upon an ass; for there is nothing so subtile and abstruse, but after being once made plain, intelligible, and common, it may be received by the slowest capacity.
We must not omit that Sphinx was conquered by a lame man, and impotent in his feet; for men usually make too much haste to the solution of Sphinx’s riddles; whence it happens, that she prevailing, their minds are rather racked and torn by disputes, than invested with command by works and effects. ”

“ In this way we obtain a solution of the Sphinx's riddle more commensurate and symmetrical with the other features of the story, which are all clothed with the grandeur of mystery. The Sphinx herself is a mystery. Whence came her monstrous nature, that so often renewed its remembrance amongst men of distant lands, in Egyptian or Ethiopian marble? Whence came her wrath against Thebes? This wrath, how durst it tower so high as to measure itself against the enmity of a nation? ”

“ Such a Sphinx is this Life of ours to all men and societies of men. Nature, like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness and tenderness; the face and bosom of a goddess, but ending in claws and the body of a lioness. There is in her a celestial beauty,—which means celestial order, pliancy to wisdom; but there is also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal. She is a goddess, but one not yet disimprisoned ”

“ How infinitely grander is the great Sphinx, with its strange, far-gazing, haunting eyes, fixed, for ever, on the East, as if expecting the dawn of a day that never comes; immovable, unchanging, without shadow of sorrow, or light of gladness, whilst the gladness of men has turned to sorrow and their thoughts to ashes before them, through three times a thousand years! ”

“ The Sphinx overcomes us by his stony, his disdainful silence. Let the visitor be ever so unimpassioned, surely he must be more than mortal to resist the impression of mingled awe, wonder, and admiration which a first sight of this weird object forces upon him. ”

“ I have seen photographs of the Sphinx, taken while I was in Cairo, much more impressive than the Sphinx itself. Lying in a hollow of the sand hills as it does, the farther you move away from it in order to get a better focus, the less you see of it, and as you draw nearer to it it loses its meaning, as does the scenery of a theatre when you are on the wrong side of the foot-lights. ”

“ Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul, — ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events! In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. ”

“ The Sphinx is staring at you, and yet through and beyond, as though her eyes rested on some inaccessible horizon. Cities crumble, nations rise and subside, and still that undeviating stare! And in her face the unroutable calm of fabulous beauty. I want those eyes, I want that face. You never heard the duo which Flaubert gives, did you? ”

“ But as I realized then, it is useless to question that eternal Sphinx, the future. From day to day she reads aloud the riddles of the yesterday, of which the puzzled wordlings of all ages have not answered one, nor ever will, guess they never so wildly or cry they never so loud. ”

“ All the august doings of Olympos and Sinai and Valhalla have been witnessed by the Sphinx: and the most favorable interpreting of that changeless face is, upon the whole, to hope it wears the provisional smile we bend toward the playing of not yet unbearable children. And therein lies the impiety of the waiting Sphinx, in this amused deep comprehension that there is no need to rebel against our gods.... For the Sphinx is immortal: and the secret of the Sphinx, men say, is that secret which the harried gods strive desperately to surmise: the Sphinx knows why no god may ever hope to be immortal. ”

“ A large crowd of guides sat around this strange lady who proposed to spend the day in front of the Sphinx. Clad in long white robes, with white turbans crowning their dark faces, they gazed into her eyes with something of the questioning expression with which she herself was looking into the eyes of the Sphinx.
There were other travellers wandering about. Just now her own party had collected to eat their lunch together; but they were scattered again, and she sat with a circle of Arabs about her, the watchful dragoman lingering near. ”

“ I am a sphinx,” was the answer. “All of us look somewhat alike, though some are smaller than others, and colours vary. But our wings are always clear cut, our scales close fitting, and our colours quiet; a tailormade air about us, as it were. We are sometimes called hawk moths, because our wings are narrow, long, and strong, and sometimes hummingbird moths, because we fly at twilight, and poise above a flower while extracting its honey, just as hummingbirds do.”
“But why are you named the sphinx?” asked Ruth. ”

“ The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God. ”

“ Mightier and mightier grew the yearning within her, as the full moon floated upward from the east and cast her dewy dreams over land and sea. The hour was come; the whole impulse and persistence of her nature went out in vivid life, and, filling the very stones which the winds had gathered and piled against her breast, cleft them with its sentient spell, clothed them with lean flesh and wiry sinews, shaped them after the fashion of the Desert men, and sent them out alive with intellect and will, but with hearts of flint, into the wide world,—the Sphinx's children! ”

“ Apart from that curious look upon its face, I have never found the Sphinx at Gizeh as impressive as the Sphingeion in Bœotia,{120} the sphinx of Œdipus outside the gates of Thebes. This is merely a hill shaped like a sphinx; and there must have been another such hill at Gizeh, from which the Sphinx was formed. There is another within a walk of here; but it takes the shape only from a certain point of view—the western rock at Haytor, as one sees it on the road from Widdicombe. In a Dartmoor mist it looks stupendous, and surpasses the Sphingeion and the Sphinx. ”

“ For the grave picture of a sphinx is all that I can see.
Vain is the driving of the sand, and vain the desert's art;
The years strive with her, but she holds the lion in her heart.
Baffled or fostered, patient still, the perfect purpose clings;
Flying or folded, strong as stone, she wears the eagle's wings.
Eastward she looks; against the sky the eternal morning lies ”

“ The Sphinx lies motionless, tracing the alphabet in the sand with its claws, musing and calculating; and while the sea ebbs and flows, the grain waves to and fro, caravans pass by, and cities fall to decay, it keeps its firm gaze bent fixedly on the horizon. ”

“ Their features are gone, and though in their attitudes there is power, and there is something that awakens awe, they are more wonderful as a far-off feature of the plain. They gain in grandeur from the night in strangeness from the moonrise, perhaps specially when the Nile comes to their feet. More than three thousand years old, they look less eternal than the Sphinx. Like them, the Sphinx is waiting, but with a greater purpose. The Sphinx reduces man really to nothingness. The Colossi leave him some remnants of individuality. ”

“ Like the Pyramids, the Sphinx has stood wrapped in mysterious silence these thousand years. The form of the Sphinx was very common in ancient Egypt, it being a symbolic representation of the king. The body of the lion symbolized his strength, or power; the human face was a portrait of the monarch. Shifting sands have accumulated to the breast of the body—said to be 140 feet long. Of the huge proportions one may judge from the fact that should a man stand upon the ear of the Sphinx his hand could not reach the top of the head. ”

“ The Sphinx lies watching the generations whirled past her into existence. She listens to the cries, the turmoil, the bitter plaints of those within the walls who believed that they had solved her problem a century ago, and as she listens she smiles her cold, incredulous smile. Not yet have they divined her secret, if one may judge from their loud protests, and this new generation pouring in among them has but small patience with their failure. ”

“ This was the 'Sphinx,' in which the artists most adroitly combined all the advantages of the original flat profiles, and of the long files of figures in perspective such as Caran d'Ache had employed, with varied backgrounds due to the aid of the magic lantern first utilized by Rivière. Of all human monuments no one has had so marvelous a series of spectacles pass before its sightless eyes as the Sphinx, reclining impassive at the edge of the desert, and at the foot of the pyramids. ”

“ From time to time others have removed the sand, but always the sand comes back and quickly steals over the body and covers it, leaving the head emerging like some monster of the desert.
In the past the Sphinx has been badly treated by the ignorant Arabs, who have smashed its face about and given it that strange expression which is a half-wry smile. Probably thousands of years hence, when our present civilization has disappeared and been forgotten, the Sphinx will still be regarding the Nile and the world with the same half-sad, half-mocking expression. ”

“ One longs to challenge converse with the male figure, with the unfinished Sphinx-like face, who is stretched there at his harmonious length, like an ancient river-god without his urn. There is nothing appalling or chilling in his expression, nor does he seem to mourn without hope. ”

“ While the sheik was seeking for his retainers, we strolled away to the Sphinx, which looked more strange and weird than ever in the moonlight. How many centuries has he sat there, crouching on the desert, and looking towards the rising sun. The body is that of a recumbent lion. The back only is seen, as the giant limbs, which are stretched out 82 sixty feet in front, are wholly covered by the sand. But the mighty head still lifts its unchanged brow above the waste, looking towards the East, to see the sun rise, as it has every morning for four thousand years. ”

“ Her own problem seemed so much more menacing. “Answer or die,” said the Sphinx of fate. Miss Pinnegar could answer her own fate according to its question. She could say “haberdashery shop,” and her sphinx would recognize this answer as true to nature, and would be satisfied. But every individual has his own, or her own fate, and her own sphinx. Alvina’s sphinx was an old, deep thoroughbred, she would take no mongrel answers. And her thoroughbred teeth were long and sharp. To Alvina, the last of the fantastic but pure-bred race of Houghton, the problem of her fate was terribly abstruse. ”

“ Unless his ready wit disclos'd
The subtle riddle she propos'd.
Oedipus was resolv'd to go,
And try what strength of parts would do.
Says Sphinx, on this depends your fate;
Tell me what animal is that
Which has four feet at morning bright,
Has two at noon and three at night?
'Tis man, said he, who, weak by nature,
At first creeps, like his fellow creature,
Upon all-four; as years accrue,
With sturdy steps he walks on two;
In age, at length, grows weak and sick,
For his third leg adopts a stick.
Now, in your turn, 'tis just methinks,
You should resolve me, Madam Sphinx. ”

“ The shallow depression in the crown of the head, once thought to be the terminus of a closed up passageway leading from the Sphinx to the Great Pyramid, was merely intended to help support a headdress now missing.
Metal rods have been driven into the Sphinx in a vain effort to discover chambers or passages within its body. The major part of the Sphinx is a single stone, but the front paws have been built up of smaller stones. The Sphinx is about 200 feet long, 70 feet high, and 38 feet wide across the shoulders. ”