exhaled from the artificially watered fields below, continues to rise,
takes heart and envelops the great mute face itself. And the latter
persists in its regard of the dead moon, preserving still the old
disconcerting smile. It becomes more and more difficult to believe that
here before us is a real colossus, so surely does it seem nothing other
than a dilated reflection of a thing which exists _elsewhere_, in
some other world. And behind in the distance are the three triangular
mountains. Them, too, the fog envelops, till they also cease to exist,
and become pure visions of the Apocalypse.

Now it is that little by little an intolerable sadness is expressed
in those large eyes with their empty sockets--for, at this moment, the
ultimate secret, that which the Sphinx seems to have known for so many
centuries, but to have withheld in melancholy irony, is this: that all
these dead men and women who sleep in the vast necropolis below have
been fooled, and the awakening signal has not sounded for a single
one of them; and that the creation of mankind--mankind that thinks and
suffers--has had no rational explanation, and that our poor aspirations
are vain, but so vain as to awaken pity.



CHAPTER II

THE PASSING OF CAIRO

Ragged, threatening clouds, like those that bring the showers of our
early spring, hurry across a pale evening sky, whose mere aspect makes
you cold. A wintry wind, raw and bitter, blows without ceasing, and
brings with it every now and then some furtive spots of rain.