The great pyramid towered up from the desert with its apex toward
the moon which hung in the sky. For centuries it had stood thus,
disdaining the aid of gods or man, being, as the Sphinx herself
observed, able to stand up for itself. And this was no small
praise from that sublime yet mysterious female who had seen the
ages come and go, empires rise and fall, novelist succeed novelist,
and who, for eons and cycles the cynosure and centre of admiration
and men's idolatrous worship, had yet--wonderful for a woman--
through it all kept her head, which now alone remained to survey
calmly the present. Indeed, at that moment that magnificent and
peaceful face seemed to have lost--with a few unimportant features--
its usual expression of speculative wisdom and intense disdain;
its mouth smiled, its left eyelid seemed to droop. As the opal
tints of dawn deepened upon it, the eyelid seemed to droop lower,
closed, and quickly recovered itself twice. You would have thought
the Sphinx had winked.

Then arose a voice like a wind on the desert,--but really from the
direction of the Nile, where a hired dahabiyeh lay moored to the
bank,--"'Arry Axes! 'Arry Axes!" With it came also a flapping,
trailing vision from the water--the sacred Ibis itself--and with
wings aslant drifted mournfully away to its own creaking echo:
"K'raksis! K'raksis!" Again arose the weird voice: "'Arry Axes!
Wotcher doin' of?" And again the Ibis croaked its wild refrain:
"K'raksis! K'raksis!" Moonlight and the hour wove their own
mystery (for which the author is not responsible), and the voice
was heard no more. But when the full day sprang in glory over the
desert, it illuminated the few remaining but sufficiently large
features of the Sphinx with a burning saffron radiance! The Sphinx