owing sunshine
almost as if you were a child laid in the lap of one of them. That
legend of the singing at dawn of the "vocal Memnon," how could it have
arisen? How could such calmness sing, such patience ever find a voice?
Unlike the Sphinx, which becomes ever more impressive as you draw near
to it, and is most impressive when you sit almost at its feet, the
Colossi lose in personality as you approach them and can see how they
have been defaced.

From afar one feels their minds, their strange, unearthly temperaments
commanding this pastoral. When you are beside them, this feeling
disappears. 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. One can conceive of
Strabo and AElius Gallus, of Hadrian and Sabina, of others who came
over the sunlit land to hear the unearthly song in the dawn, being of
some--not much, but still of some--importance here. Before the Sphinx
no one is important. But in the distance of the plain the Colossi shed
a real magic of calm and solemn personality, and subtly seem to mingle
their spirit with the flat, green world, so wide, so still, so fecund,
and so peaceful; with the soft airs that are surely scented with an
eternal springtime, and with the light that the morning rains down on
wheat and clover, on Indian corn and barley, and on brown men laboring,
who, perhaps, from the patience of the Colossi in repose have drawn a
patience in labor that has in it something not less sublime.

From the Colossi one goes onward toward the trees and the mountains, and
very soon one comes to the edge of that strange and fascinating strip of
barren land which is strewn with temples and honeycombed with tombs. The
sun burns down on it. The heat seems thrown back upon it by the wall of
tawny mountains that bounds it on the west. It is dusty, it is arid; it
is haunted by swarms of flies, by the guardians of the ruins, and by men
and boys trying to sell enormous scarabs and necklaces and amulets, made
yesterday, and the day before, in the