You would have thought
the Sphinx had winked.
Then arose a voice like a wind on the desert,--but really from the
direction of the Nile, where a hired dahabiyeh lay moored to the
bank,--"'Arry Axes! 'Arry Axes!" With it came also a flapping,
trailing vision from the water--the sacred Ibis itself--and with
wings aslant drifted mournfully away to its own creaking echo:
"K'raksis! K'raksis!" Again arose the weird voice: "'Arry Axes!
Wotcher doin' of?" And again the Ibis croaked its wild refrain:
"K'raksis! K'raksis!" Moonlight and the hour wove their own
mystery (for which the author is not responsible), and the voice
was heard no more. But when the full day sprang in glory over the
desert, it illuminated the few remaining but sufficiently large
features of the Sphinx with a burning saffron radiance! The Sphinx
had indeed blushed!
II
It was the full season at Cairo. The wealth and fashion of
Bayswater, South Kensington, and even the bosky Wood of the
Evangelist had sent their latest luxury and style to flout the
tombs of the past with the ghastly flippancy of to-day. The cheap
tripper was there--the latest example of the Darwinian theory--
apelike, flea and curio hunting! Shamelessly inquisitive and
always hungry, what did he know of the Sphinx or the pyramids or
the voice--and, for the matter of that, what did they know of him?
And yet he was not half bad in comparison with the "swagger
people,"--these people who pretend to have lungs and what not, and
instead of galloping on merry hunters through the frost and snow of
Piccadilly and Park, instead of enjoying the roaring fires of piled
logs in the evening, at the first approach of winter steal away to
the Land of the Sun, and decline to die, like honest Britons, on
British soil.
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