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The dust was blown about in clouds; and here and there, sitting upon the vacant steps that led up and down among the booths, were dejected and motionless men and women, passively gathering dust, and apparently awaiting burial under the accumulating sand, the mute, melancholy sphinxes of the Jubilee, with their unsolved riddle, "Why did we come?"
"I will gladly save you the walk," replied Klea, while the Smith sat down on the pedestal of one of the Sphinxes, and opening the leather wallet which hung by his side shook out the contents.
The servants seemed to hold themselves as much aloof as their mistress, and though Robert and his mother attended service regularly every Sabbath, they appeared as gravely silent and ungregarious as Sphinxes.
There was a shorter way to Memphis, but she chose this one, because the mounds of sand on each side of the road bordered by Sphinxes which every day had to be cleared of the desert-drift concealed her from the sight of her companions in the temple; besides the best and safest way into the city was by a road leading from a crescent, decorated with busts of the philosophers, that lay near the principal entrance to the new Apis tombs.
In order to reach it, there has been thrown over the little river, la Vienne, a broad and well-constructed bridge, ornamented with four stone sphinxes; and in front of the bridge is a large iron gate, opening on an immense court, in which seven or eight thousand men could be drilled.
In the foreground, at their horses' feet, wound from the hill summit a broad track faintly marked in the deep sand, and flanked by huge dunes shaped, by the action of the winds, into grotesque semblances of monsters, leviathans, beasts with prodigious humps, sphinxes, whales. This track was presently lost in the blanched plains.
The great Sphinx at Gizeh, so familiar to all the world, the Sphinxes of Tanis, the statue from the Fayum, the statue of the Esquiline at Rome, and the Colossi of Bubastis all represent black, full-blooded Negroes and are described by Petrie as "having high cheek bones, flat cheeks, both in one plane, a massive nose, firm projecting lips, and thick hair, with an austere and almost savage expression of power."
When at last they reached the landing-place, the procession had already passed on to the temple of Seti; Ameni had met it with his chorus of singers, and had received the God on the shore of the Nile; the prophets of the Necropolis had with their own hands placed him in the sacred Sam-bark of the House of Seti, which was artistically constructed of cedar wood and electrum set with jewels; thirty pastophori took the precious burden on their shoulders, and bore it up the avenue of Sphinxes which led from the river to the temple into the sanctuary of Seti, where Amon remained while the emissaries from the different provinces deposited their offerings in the forecourt.
"She thinks I am going to propose to her!" he thought ruefully; "it will be a delicate business undeceiving her. I wish it was over and done with!" It was quite dark by the time they had crossed the river by the ferry, and made their way up to the entrance to the pleasure gardens, imposing enough, with its white colonnade, its sphinxes, and lines of coloured lamps.
There is much richness and beauty in many of the slabs now in the Phoenician collection of the Louvre, especially in those which exhibit the forms of sphinxes or griffins. Many of the patterns most affected are markedly Assyrian in character, as the rosette, the palm-head, the intertwined ribbons, and the rows of gradines which occur so frequently.
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