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On the Pyramids 323
being which has seen all the history that is history from the
very beginning. It seems as old as the beginning of the
world. Dr. Budge says that Egypt had a certain civilisation
fifteen thousand years ago ; the depraved Egyptian made
sham glass jewels six thousand years ago. What city, I
wonder, was the Egyptian Brummagem ?
At last everything has gone except two sand-carts, two
squatting Arabs and a loving couple ; so the blessed quiet,
the peace of God is returning. This is the most marvellous
night we have ever spent under the gemmed Egyptian sky.
I like to hear the eternal barking of the dogs at the villages
of the Pyramid Arabs by the still waters of the inundation :
it fits in. It is wise to wander to the little hill above the
Sphinx also, to see its long white figure and the white bones
of its back, while the head looks as dark as a Nubians in the
clear, keen desert air. From this point you get all three
pyramids in a line and the Sphinx crouching at their feet.
Where the paws of the Sphinx were showing but a few months
ago are two gaily caparisoned camels with their drivers, like
black nine-pins, sitting beside them. The temple below the
Sphinx looks curiously ghastly with its low walls staring up
at the sky. It reminds me for some subtle reason of the
exhumed, lava-crusted corpses in the museum of Pompeii.
We shall not linger. long looking at it. Out at the Pyramids
he who hesitates is not lost, but is found by an Arab looking
for bakshish. From above, the black figures on the sand in
front of the Sphinx look very weird. It is by moonlight that
the Sphinx gets over its sunken position best ; it is even an
improvement.
The monster, the Ancient of Days, crouches like a lion in
its sand-cup ; it is always listening with its great ears—mar-
vellously listening ears ; but its wise lips are always sealed.
To stand under the Sphinx at moonlight extinguishes even
Abu Simbel ; the Arabs, in their ghostly garments, are just
the right touch. But by all the canons of poetical justice, the
piastres, which you give them to hold their peace, ought to
have turned into the little round flat stones, which are called
the Sphinx's money, when they take them from their bosoms