thing could perturb her.

But by mouldering rungs of ladders as old as Man, by slippery edges of
the dreaded abyss, with an ominous dizziness about my heart and a
feeling of horror in the soles of my feet, I clambered from tower to
tower till I found the door that I sought; and it opened on to one of
the upper branches of a huge and sombre pine, down which I climbed on
to the floor of the forest. And I was glad to be back again in the
forest from which I had fled.

And the Sphinx in her menaced house--I know not how she fared--whether
she gazes for ever, disconsolate, at the deed, remembering only in her
smitten mind, at which the little boys now leer, that she once knew
well those things at which man stands aghast; or whether in the end
she crept away, and clambering horribly from abyss to abyss, came at
last to higher things, and is wise and eternal still. For who knows of
madness whether it is divine or whether it be of the pit?



PROBABLE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE LITERARY MEN


When the nomads came to El Lola they had no more songs, and the
question of stealing the golden box arose in all its magnitude. On the
one hand, many had sought the golden box, the receptacle (as the
Aethiopians know) of poems of fabulous value; and their doom is still
the common talk of Arabia. On the other hand, it was lonely to sit
around the camp-fire by night with no new songs.