But he was not long in finding that the more and the closer he stared the more difficult the problem became. To begin with the blemishes distracted him overmuch. The main cast of the face appeared, though subtle, simple and grand enough, but the fissures between the blocks that composed it, the discolorations, and the crevices that ran from side to side confused his eye. "If it were only perfect, all would be much easier to discover," he murmured. Then, too, the expression of the Sphinx and the import of the smile seemed to vary with the changes of the weather. On fresh-blowing sunny days the image beamed on him with a shadow-dappled, bleached cheerfulness of resignation. But when the sun raged the face, too, raged as with an inward fury; its lineaments shook in the heat-eddies that arose from the sand, and every grain glowed like a particle of fire. Nor did its rage abate during the succeeding night. The rising of the tropic moon gave to its complexion, streaked with violet shadows, an ashen hue: the pallidity of an unappeasable and frustrated anger. On lowering days it blackly scowled, and the swollen nostrils and imperious mouth assumed the similitude of being endowed only with the bitterest irony, a constancy of cruelty and an unquestionable scorn. Then he hated it.... At last, perceiving that the secret was not to be gained in a few days or even in a few moons, he resolved to settle in the desert opposite the Sphinx. Three years passed. Day by day and night by night Es-siddeeh watched the Sphinx. Daily the sun, shining upon the surface of the mask, seemed to make it more impenetrable, and nightly the moon, deepening the shadows in the crevices, increased its mystery. Round about the knoll, which the pilgrim had selected for his station, the sand gave off a glare more deadly than the bed of a furnace or, rising in whirlwind-spouts whose tops spattered ashes upon him, circled his island like monstrous and infuriate djinns. Toward sunset the clouds, gathered in an awful and silent grandeur, discharged, with stunning clap and reverberations as of mountains overthrown, their lightnings, a shower of blue arrows, to all quarters of the fluttering horizon. Once indeed Es-siddeeh awoke to behold a body of dense vapour launch itself wrathfully downward against the head of the brooding Sphinx and wreath it with a crown of crackling fire. The scribe leaped up, and, despite the pressure of the blast, succeeded in gaining, not without considerable risk to himself, a position before the base of the monster. His courage was unrewarded. Upon that obstinate mien, livid in the tawny light, the rain glistened as if there had indeed started from the stony pores a ghastly dew; but the thin lips were as tightly compressed as ever. "Hideous Sphinx!" exclaimed the youth, "thou cruelty incarnate, cannot even the ire of the gods subdue thee? Shall I never, from some motion of thy visage, learn what secret thou hidest?"