appearance of a crowd of Arabs who poured out of a village to offer us their aid in various ways. We had been told before we started, that a party who had visited the Pyramids the night before had been a good deal victimised by these Arabs, who, alas! in these degenerate days, have no other mode of indulging their predatory propensities than by exacting the greatest possible amount of 'backshish' from travellers who visit the Pyramids. We pushed on over the heaps of sand and _débris_, or probably covered-up tombs, which surround the base of the Pyramids, when we suddenly came in face of the most remarkable object on which my eye ever lighted. Somehow or other I had not thought of the Sphinx till I saw her before me. There she was in all her imposing magnitude, crouched on the margin of the Desert, looking over the fertile valley of the Nile, and her gaze fixed on the East as if in earnest expectation of the sun-rising. And such a gaze! The mystical light and deep shadows cast by the moon, gave to it an intensity which I cannot attempt to describe. To me it seemed a look, earnest, searching, but unsatisfied. For a long time I remained transfixed, endeavouring to read the meaning conveyed by this wonderful eye; but I was struck after a while by what seemed a contradiction in the expression of the eye and of the mouth. There was a singular gentleness and hopefulness in the lines of the mouth, which appeared to be in contrast with the anxious eye. Mr. Bowlby, who was a very _sympathique_ inquirer into the significancy of this wonderful monument, agreed with me in thinking that the upper part of the face spoke of the intellect striving, and striving vainly, to solve the mystery--(What mystery? the mystery, shall we say, of God's universe or of man's destiny?)--while the lower indicated a moral conviction that all must be well, and that this truth would in good time be made manifest.