g it is that before there was the
Sphinx he was able to see it with his imagination! One may criticize the
Sphinx. One may say impertinent things that are true about it: that
seen from behind at a distance its head looks like an enormous mushroom
growing in the sand, that its cheeks are swelled inordinately, that
its thick-lipped mouth is legal, that from certain places it bears a
resemblance to a prize bull-dog. All this does not matter at all. What
does matter is that into the conception and execution of the Sphinx has
been poured a supreme imaginative power. He who created it looked beyond
Egypt, beyond the life of man. He grasped the conception of Eternity,
and realized the nothingness of Time, and he rendered it in stone.

I can imagine the most determined atheist looking at the Sphinx and, in
a flash, not merely believing, but feeling that he had before him proof
of the life of the soul beyond the grave, of the life of the soul of
Khufu beyond the tomb of his Pyramid. Always as you return to the Sphinx
you wonder at it more, you adore more strangely its repose, you steep
yourself more intimately in the aloof peace that seems to emanate from
it as light emanates from the sun. And as you look on it at last perhaps
you understand the infinite; you understand where is the bourne to which
the finite flows with all its greatness, as the great Nile flows from
beyond Victoria Nyanza to the sea.

And as the wonder of the Sphinx takes possession of you gradually, so
gradually do you learn to feel the majesty of the Pyramids of Ghizeh.
Unlike the Step Pyramid of Sakkara, which, even when one is near it,
looks like a small mountain, part of the land on which it rests, the
Pyramids of Ghizeh look what they are--artificial excrescences, invented
and carried out by man, expressions of man's greatness. Exquisite as
they are as features of the drowsy golden landscape at the setting of
the sun, I think they look most wonderful at night, when they are black
beneath the stars. On many nights I have sat in the sand at a distance
and looked at them, and always, and increasingly, they have stirred
my imagination. Their profound calm, their classical simplicity, are
greatly emphasized when no detail can be seen, when they are but black
shapes towering to the stars. They seem to aspire then like prayers
prayed by one who has said, "God does not need any prayers, but I need
them." In their simplicity they suggest a crowd of thoughts and of