till the imagination is almost stricken by their looming greatness.
Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with Abou on its summit, come down,
penetrate into its recesses, stand in the king's chamber, listen to the
silence there, feel it with your hands--is it not tangible in this hot
fastness of incorruptible death?--creep, like the surreptitious midget
you feel yourself to be, up those long and steep inclines of polished
stone, watching the gloomy darkness of the narrow walls, the far-off
pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who guides you, hear the twitter
of the bats that have their dwelling in this monstrous gloom that man
has made to shelter the thing whose ambition could never be embalmed,
though that, of all qualities, should have been given here, in the land
it dowered, a life perpetual. Now you know the Great Pyramid. You know
that you can climb it, that you can enter it. You have seen it from all
sides, under all aspects. It is familiar to you.

No, it can never be that. With its more wonderful comrade, the Sphinx,
it has the power peculiar, so it seems to me, to certain of the rock and
stone monuments of Egypt, of holding itself ever aloof, almost like the
soul of man which can retreat at will, like the Bedouin retreating from
you into the blackness of the Pyramid, far up, or far down, where the
pursuing stranger, unaided, cannot follow.




II

THE SPHINX

One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx--a bird