Revealing The Sphinx

What the ancient Egyptians intended to represent by the sphinx with which they lined the avenues approaching their temples no man hath learned. It is supposed they typified the mysterious nature of the divinity - the silent, enduring force of the mighty spirit which moved all things and knew neither beginning nor end. The great sphinx of the pyramid bas been the problem of the ages as far back as we can penétrate. It is believed to have been sculptured before the days of Cheops, the builder of the flrst pyramid. It is an inheritance from the buried ages, an undecipherable, mysterious thing at whieh all look with awe and over which the wisest puzzle in vain. The sphinx of Greek mythology were combinations of woman and lion, the head and breast of the firet and the body of the second, with wings added; but the Egyptian sphinx were alvvays male, always bearded and capped, and the lion's body to which the head was attached is wingless. The great sphinx of the pyramid originally bad a beard, but it disappeared under the continuous mutilation which the face has undergone. Fragmenta of it have been found bdow. The sphinx stands near the eastern edge of the platform on which the pyramids stand, with its face looking toward the Nile. The face is 28 feet 6 inches long, the whole figure 136 feet long, 00 feet high before the present work of uncoveing it from the sand was begun. Around thfi heád it measures 103 feet. Mark Twain gives one a better idea of its size than we can get from figures, when he says the bloek from which it was carved must have been as large as the Fifth Avenue hotel in New York city before the usual waste (by the necessities of sculpture) of a fourth or a half of the original mass was begun. Tbis species of stone is harder than iron- so hard that figures cut in it remain distinctly defined although exposed to the weather for 2,000 or 3,000 years. A hundred or more years of patiënt toil was necessary to car va it. This monstrous stone riddle of the ages for centuries has stood with the head, breast and part of the back rising above the sand. Last year Brugsch Bey began to have the sand cleared away from the base of the sphinx, and now the paws, and the chapel which they inclose, the large granite stela and the granite altar are visible. The hind part of him is still buried, but his true proportions can now be estimatetl. So thoroughly were the lower parts bidden that the Arabs in the middle ages believed it to be a standing figure buried to the head in sand. He now stands revealed, a form instinct with vitality, "the personiftcation of the greatest physical strength and the highest intellectual f orce in repose, but alert and vigilant." The lower portion of the shoulders and paws are covered with slabs of stone. Some of these are already displaced, and there is danger that if the paws remain uncovered rcuch daraage will be done to them. Mark ïwain, in his "Innocents Abroad," has this poetical apostrophe to this mighty relie of the art of an unknown age: The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patieut. There was a dignity not of earth ia its mien and in its countenance a benignity such as never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone tbougbt, ït was thinking, it was looking toward the verge oí the landscape, yet looking at nothing- notbing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything of the present and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of time- over lines of century waves whicb, further and further reeeding, closed nearer and nearer togetherand blended at last into one unbroken tide away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it bad witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and deeay, of 5,000 slow, revolv. ing years. It was the type of an attribute of man- of a faculty of nis heart and brain. It was Memory, Retrospection- wrought into visible, tangible form. All who know what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished and faces that have vanisbed- albeit only a trifling score of years gone by- will have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in these grave eyes that lookso steadfastlyback upon the things they knew before history was bom- before tradition had being- things that were, and forms that moved, in a vague era which even poetry and romance scarce know of- and passed one by one away and left the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a strange new age and uncomprehended scènes. Thesphinx is grand In its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story. And there Is that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveáis to one something of what he shall feöl when he shall stuud at last iu the awful preseuce of God.