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Updated: May 15, 2025
Shifting several bottles on the bar with apparent industry. "How can I tell?" returned the newcomer lightly. "Fate is a Sphynx, and I am not OEdipus to answer her questions!" The landlord looked startled, paused in his feigned employment, but slowly recovering himself, began to dust a jar of peppermint candy. "How far is it to Meadtown?" continued the guest. "Forty odd miles!
There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them. The Sphynx. It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.
She was in the gayest of humors, and for a time she bantered and coquetted with him with an unrestrained and childlike enjoyment in her mood, taking his ardent lovemaking as a matter of course; but, gradually, as they rode, she became more quiet and fell into silence, the Sphynx expression appearing on her face. Suddenly she leaned forward in her saddle and looked at him.
"The Sphynx in the Desert. Rome is a desert to me." "It only depends on you " Orsino began. "Oh, of course! To make acquaintances, to show myself a little everywhere it is simple enough. But it wearies me until one is caught up in the machinery, a toothed wheel going round with the rest, one only bores oneself, and I may leave so soon. Decidedly it is not worth the trouble. Is it?"
The Sphynx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of what he shall feel when he shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.
Look about you, the pale throng of men surrounds you. The eyes of life's sphynx glitter in the midst of divine hieroglyphics; decipher the book of life! Courage, scholar, launch out on the Styx, the deathless flood, and let the waves of sorrow waft you to oblivion or to God."
Then he desisted and went away. The Sphynx: a hundred and twenty-five feet long, sixty feet high, and a hundred and two feet around the head, if I remember rightly carved out of one solid block of stone harder than any iron. I only set down these figures and these remarks to suggest the prodigious labor the carving of it so elegantly, so symmetrically, so faultlessly, must have cost.
The warm, provocative, inherent coquetry was gone from both smile and eyes; instead of a soft, alluring girl ready to play with him a baffling, blood-stirring game of flirtation, she was again the sphynx of last night, whose unrevealing eyes seemed to have looked out over the desert for centuries, until its infinite heart was as an open page to her, and she repressed in the scarlet curves of her mouth its eternal, secret enigma.
Everybody agreed that there was something mysterious, if not entirely unnatural in the conduct of the young woman. Nobody likes unsolved riddles for long. The moment or century of suspense may prove interesting even exciting; but human intelligence resents the Sphynx. Ellen Dix was intensely human. She was, moreover, jealous or supposed she was, which often amounts to the same thing.
She never removed a carcase, but left them there for bait. I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill thirty or forty mosquitoes watched her, and waited for her to say something, but she never did. So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said: "The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam." "You bet!" "What did I understand you to say, madam?" "You BET!"
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