Climb The Great Pyramid, Spend A Day With Abou On Its
Summit, Come Down, Penetrate Into Its Recesses, Stand In The King's
Chamber, Listen To The Silence There, Feel It With Your Hands - Is It
Not Tangible In This Hot Fastness Of Incorruptible Death?
- Creep, like
the surreptitious midget you feel yourself to be, up those long and
steep inclines of polished stone,
Watching the gloomy darkness of the
narrow walls, the far-off pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who
guides you, hear the twitter of the bats that have their dwelling in
this monstrous gloom that man has made to shelter the thing whose
ambition could never be embalmed, though that, of all qualities,
should have been given here, in the land it dowered, a life perpetual.
Now you know the Great Pyramid. You know that you can climb it, that
you can enter it. You have seen it from all sides, under all aspects.
It is familiar to you.
No, it can never be that. With its more wonderful comrade, the Sphinx,
it has the power peculiar, so it seems to me, to certain of the rock
and stone monuments of Egypt, of holding itself ever aloof, almost
like the soul of man which can retreat at will, like the Bedouin
retreating from you into the blackness of the Pyramid, far up, or far
down, where the pursuing stranger, unaided, cannot follow.
II
THE SPHINX
One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx - a bird
like a swallow, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of blue
somewhere on its wings.
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