died. I must 'a' been
clear dead and gone for as much as a minute or more; then I come to, and
Tom had hitched a boat-hook on to the lower lip of the giant and was
holding the balloon steady with it whilst he canted his head back and got
a good long look up at that awful face.

Jim was on his knees with his hands clasped, gazing up at the thing in a
begging way, and working his lips, but not getting anything out. I took
only just a glimpse, and was fading out again, but Tom says:

"He ain't alive, you fools; it's the Sphinx!"

I never see Tom look so little and like a fly; but that was because the
giant's head was so big and awful. Awful, yes, so it was, but not
dreadful any more, because you could see it was a noble face, and kind of
sad, and not thinking about you, but about other things and larger. It
was stone, reddish stone, and its nose and ears battered, and that give
it an abused look, and you felt sorrier for it for that.

We stood off a piece, and sailed around it and over it, and it was just
grand. It was a man's head, or maybe a woman's, on a tiger's body a
hundred and twenty-five foot long, and there was a dear little temple
between its front paws. All but the head used to be under the sand, for
hundreds of years, maybe thousands, but they had just lately dug the sand
away and found that little temple. It took a power of sand to bury that
cretur; most as much as it would to bury a steamboat, I reckon.

We landed Jim on top of the head, with an American flag to protect him,
it being a foreign land; then we sailed off to this and that and t'other
distance, to git what Tom called effects and perspectives and
proportions, and Jim he done the best he could, striking all the
different kinds of attitudes and positions he could study up, but
standing on his head and working his legs the way a frog does was the
best. The further we got away, the littler Jim got, and the grander the
Sphinx got, till at last it was only a clothespin on a dome, as you might
say. That's the way perspective brings out the correct proportions, Tom
said; he said Julus Cesar's niggers didn't know how big he was, they was
too close to him.

Then we sailed off further and further, till we couldn't see Jim at all
any more, and then that great figger was at its noblest, a-gazing out
over the Nile Valley so still and solemn and lonesome, and all the little
shabby huts and things that was scattered about it clean disappeared and
gone, and