yet unknown, they chose to come to this plain, that they choose solemnly
to remain there, waiting, while the harvests grow and are gathered about
their feet, while the Nile rises and subsides, while the years and
the generations come, like the harvests, and are stored away in the
granaries of the past. Their calm broods over this plain, gives to it
a personal atmosphere which sets it quite apart from every other flat
space of the world. There is no place that I know on the earth which has
the peculiar, bright, ineffable calm of the plain of these Colossi. It
takes you into its breast, and you lie there in the growing 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