Cheops built his Pyramid the Sphinx
sat with his back turned to it wearing the same inscrutable smile that
it has to-day. It has watched kings succeed and die, it has watched
empires spread and collapse, it has watched civilisations ripen and
wither away. All the known history of mankind has unrolled before it,
not the short history of a few trifling centuries which we call ours,
but the history of the world.

The crouching figure is lion-like in attitude, but how human of face in
spite of its broken nose. It was carven of the solid rock and fashioned
with its face to the sunrise and its back to the desert. No one knows
the thought in the mind of the puny artist who brought it into being and
then shrivelled beside it like a blade of grass. Was it intended to be a
god? It has been silted up by sand and unburied again; it has been
worshipped and hated. It has been reverenced and shot at, so that its
face is chipped and its nose broken away, and still it smiles with
fierce serenity.

Sit silently.

"Poste-carte----"

"Imshi, imshi."

That Arabic word, picked up at hazard from the dragoman, has acted like
a talisman--the pest has actually gone!

There creeps up beside you, very slowly and determinedly, an old, old
man. "Fortune told," he says almost in a whisper, groping for your hard
boyish hand. So be it! He at least does not send the spirit of the place
flying away. Nonsense it may be, but these fellows do know something----

Give him that five piastre piece that looks like a large shilling and
listen to his quaint expressive English.

"Clever head, head very much good, gooder than many men, but an enemy
inside there. You see a long, long road, and you go that road, then
coming hills and that road grow tiresome and you stop and say, 'Not
worth it, I don't care,' an enemy here--slay him!

"Much work lies to your hands to do when they grow large. In many lands
I see them plucking down cities and raising ships from the depths of the
sea. Strange things be waiting for those hands in all the world. Many
tongues you speaking, and many things you gain. But the hand not opening
easily. What it gains it grips, hard and tight; it is a close hand, and
that which comes thereout drops slowly between the fingers to friends
also as to foes. Riches and work and honour hold the hands, and only
death will tear them away. With them all is a bitterness and a glory
greater than the shine of what men count joy. But in that day whe