It seems absurd to say that the Sphinx is disappointing, but so many who have seen it say so that I feel I am one of many, and not individually lacking in reverence or imagination. In the first place, the approach to it is bad; you come at the Sphinx not from the front, but from the rear, where all you can see of it is a round ball of crumbling stone spreading out from a neck of broken outline, much smaller and meaner than you had imagined it would be. In the second place, instead of looking up at it, or having it look down at you, you view it first from a semicircular ridge of sand, at the bottom of which it reposes, and at such a near view that whatever outline or character of countenance it once possessed is lost. I have seen photographs of the Sphinx, taken while I was in Cairo, much more impressive than the Sphinx itself. Lying in a hollow of the sand hills as it does, the farther you move away from it in order to get a better focus, the less you see of it, and as you draw nearer to it it loses its meaning, as does the scenery of a theatre when you are on the wrong side of the foot-lights. I know that that is an unpopular thing to say, and that there are many who feel thrills when they first look upon the face of the Sphinx, and who describe their emotions to you at length, and who write down their impressions in their diaries when they get back to the hotel. But they have come a long way expecting to be thrilled, and they do not intend to be disappointed. Some of the sphinxes in the museum of Gizeh, which you pass on your way to the pyramids, impressed me more than did the one great Sphinx, though they were indoors and surrounded by attendants and the cheap decoration of the museum, once a palace for the harem. They were of green stone and of huge proportions, and with "the curling lip and sneer of cold command"; and if you look at them long enough you feel uncomfortable shivers down your back, and a perfectly irrational impulse to rush at them and beat them in the face and force them to tell you what they know and what they have kept back and have been keeping back for centuries and centuries. Their faces show that they know all that we know and much besides that we shall never know, and when the world at last comes to an end they will stretch themselves and smile at one another and say: "Now _they_ know it, but we knew it all the while. We could have told had we liked, but we have enjoyed watching them fretting and fuming and prying about and tinkering at our faces with their little hammers, and blowing us up with saltpetre only to try and put us back again with steam. We who have kept our secret from Herodotus and Caesar, are we likely to give it up to Ebers and Mark Twain?"