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A companion to this one, for they were always erected in pairs, has been removed. In ancient times a paved street led from this temple to Karnak, which is reached by a short walk. This ancient street was adorned by a row of ram-headed sphinxes on each side.
Croesus, after reflecting a moment, answered with a smile: "Those huge pyramidal masses of stone seem to me creations of the boundless desert, the gaily painted temple colonnades to be the children of the Spring; but though the sphinxes lead up to your temple gates, and seem to point the way into the very shrines themselves, the sloping fortress-like walls of the Pylons, those huge isolated portals, appear as if placed there to repel entrance.
A few moments later obelisks commenced to tower in the distance; pylons and vast flights of steps guarded by sphinxes became clearly outlined against the horizon. We had reached our destination.
He writes of his entrance to the Mediterranean, "It was a lovely morning, and nothing could be grander than Ape Hill on one side and the Rock on the other, looking like great lions or sphinxes on each side of a gateway." In Cairo, Huxley found much to interest him in archaeology, geology, and the every-day life of the streets.
An old gypsy woman was seated on the ground nursing her knees, and occasionally poking a skewer into the round kettle that sent forth an odorous steam; two small shock-headed children were lying prone and resting on their elbows something like small sphinxes; and a placid donkey was bending his head over a tall girl, who, lying on her back, was scratching his nose and indulging him with a bite of excellent stolen hay.
The young pharaoh had the wish at least to slap the pious man with the side of his sword for such an answer, but he restrained himself. Ramses and the priests entered the main building by an immense court and passed between two rows of sphinxes. Here in a very spacious, but somewhat dark, antechamber were eight doors, and the overseer inquired,
Writing from his camping-ground on the edge of the Desert, he says, "The Pyramids and Sphinxes, in ordinary daylight, are merely ugly, and do not look half as large as they ought to look from their real size; but in particular effects of light and shade, with a fine sunset behind them, for example, or when the sky lights up again, a quarter or half an hour afterwards, when long beams of rose-colored light shoot up like a glory from behind the middle one into a sky of the most lovely violet, they then look imposing, with their huge black masses against the flood of brilliant light behind."
Sphinxes are supposed to be shrouded in mystery, aren't they?" "This one is," smiled Grace. Then her face sobered instantly. "I hope no one else besides ourselves finds out. We ought to keep her identity a secret. I think the idea is simply great, don't you?" Arline nodded. "Come on over and see her," she coaxed.
All women are not capable of it.... And time passes, the years go by, youth fades: and yet there were lovely things and good things in us all useless, for day by day they die, and one has to surrender them to the fools and people whom one despises, people who will despise oneself!... And nobody understands! One would think that we were sphinxes.
They must have been enormous, perhaps the most imposing ever built by man: witness the ruins of Karnac a temple designated by the Greeks as that of Jupiter Ammon -with its large blocks of stone seventy feet in length, on a platform one thousand feet long and three hundred wide, its alleys over a mile in length lined with colossal sphinxes, and all adorned with obelisks and columns, and surrounded with courts and colonnades, like Solomon's temple, to accommodate the crowds of worshippers as well as priests.
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