The Sphinx, and the man with the hammer

You do not climb the Great Pyramid. You are climbed up it. At the bottom a crowd of Arabs takes possession of you, two by the arms and one behind, and then they run you up the side, step by step, and each step is as high as a kitchen table. You are not consulted. You go up the Great Pyramid of Cheops like a sack of meal going into a loft, and at every tenth step they stop and ask for backsheesh, and you give it, because you are halfway up a pyramid and they are not.

The view from the top was very fine: the Nile, and the green strip it waters, and the yellow desert beginning exactly where the green leaves off, as if it had been ruled with a pencil. I was too out of breath to admire it properly. I admired it later, from a photograph, sitting down.

The Sphinx

Then we went down and stood in front of the Sphinx, and it was the one thing on the whole trip that was larger and better than I had been told. It is a great stone face, worn by the sand and by time, looking out over the desert towards the east, as it has every morning since before Moses. It is not looking at you. It is looking at something a great way past you, and it is very patient, and it is not interested in your opinion. I stood there a long while and felt about the size I am.

The Sphinx has seen everything men have done for five thousand years, and has kept its counsel, which is more than the rest of us managed in five months.

And then I heard a tapping, and looked up, and there was a man from our own ship, a respectable man with a family in Ohio, up on the jaw of the Sphinx with a hammer, knocking off a piece to take home. He was a specimen hunter. Every ship has one. He had a piece of the Parthenon in his trunk and a piece of the Holy Sepulchre in his pocket and if he could have got a piece of the Emperor of Russia he would have. We got him down. I wish I could say we threw him in the Nile.