l air of a popular refrain
of the music halls; but when in a dip of the ground all this had
disappeared, what a sense of deliverance possessed us, how far off
this turmoil seemed! As soon as we commenced to tread upon the sand of
centuries, where all at once our footsteps made no sound, nothing seemed
to have existence, save only the great calm and the religious awe of
this world into which we were come, of this world with its so crushing
commentary upon our own, where all seemed silent, undefined, gigantic
and suffused with rose-colour.

And first there is the pyramid of Cheops, whose immutable base we had
to skirt on our way hither. In the moonlight we could see the separate
blocks, so enormous, so regular, so even in their layers, which lie
one above the other to infinity, getting ever smaller and smaller, and
mounting, mounting in diminishing perspective, until at last high up
they form the apex of this giddy triangle. And the pyramid seemed to be
illumined by some sad dawn of the end of the world, a dawn which made
ruddy only the sands and the granites of earth, and left the heavens,
pricked with their myriad stars, more awful in their darkness. How
impossible it is for us to conceive the mental attitude of that
king who, during some half-century, spent the lives of thousands and
thousands of his slaves in the construction of this tomb, in the fond
and foolish hope of prolonging to infinity the existence of his mummy.

The pyramid once passed there was still a short way to go before we
confronted the Sphinx, in the middle of what our contemporaries have
left him of his desert. We had to descend the slope of that sandhill
which looked like a cloud, and seemed as if covered with felt, in order
to preserve in such a place a more complete silence. And here and there
we passed a gaping black hole--an airhole, as it seemed, of the profound
and inextricable kingdom of mummies, very populous still, in spite of
the zeal of the exhumers.

As we descended the sandy pathway we were not slow to perceive the
Sphinx itself, half hill, half couchant beast, turning its back upon
us in the attitude of a gigantic dog, that thought to bay the moon; its
head stood out in dark silhouette, like a screen before the light it
seemed to be regarding, and the lappets of its headgear showed like
downhanging ears. And then gradually, as we walked on, we saw it in
profile, shorn of its nose--flat-nosed like a death's head--but having
already