Long had she sat, crouched upon her breast,--crouched, but not for slumber or for spring. No slumber gloomed darkly in those broad, sad eyes; no dream indefinably softened the lips, whose patient outline breathed only wakefulness and expectation,--a long-deferred, yet constant expectation,--a hope that would have been despair, save that it was just within hope's limits,--a monotonous, reiterate, indestructible chord in the creature's mystic existence, that, once struck by some mighty, shrouded Hand of Power, still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;--a couchant leopard has posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye, quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin, clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the white, red-set teeth, the slavering crunch of the jaw: but nothing of all these fired the quiet and the silence of the crouching Sphinx; nerve and muscle in tranquil strength lay relaxed, though not unconscious. Year after year the yellow Desert robed itself in burning mists, splendid and deadly; year after year the hot simoom licked up its sands, and, whirling them madly over the dead plain, dashed them against the silent Sphinx, and grain by grain heaped her slow-growing grave; the Nile spread its waters across the green valley, and lapped its brink with a watery thirst for land, and then receded to its channel, and poured its ancient flood still downward to the sea; worshipped, or desecrated; threaded by black Nubian boatmen, who mocked its sacred name with such savage mirth as satyrs might have spirted from their hairy lips; navigated by keen-eyed Arabs, lithe and dark and treacherous as the river beneath them; Coptic shepherds, lingering on the brink, drank the sweet waters, and led their flocks to drink at the shallows, when the shepherd's star cleft that deepest sky with its crest, and warned the simple people of their hour;--yet forever stood the Sphinx, passionately patient, looking for sunrise, over desert, vale, and river,--beyond man,--to her hour.--And the hour came.