That settled it. I dashed downstairs and sorted out my charges. They had got themselves up in all kinds of costumes, for this "act." One man had on a folding opera-hat, which he had thought just the right thing for Egypt, as it was so easy to pack! Girls in evening dress; men young and old in helmets and straw hats, ancient maidens, and fat married ladies, in dust cloaks or ball gowns, climbed or leaped or scrambled onto camels, with shrieks of joy or moans of horror: or else they tumbled onto donkeys which bounded away before the riders were well on their backs. And men, women, and animals were shouting, giggling, groaning, gabbling, snarling, and squeaking; an extraordinary procession to pay honour to the Pyramids and the lonely Sphinx.
We of the roof-party considered ourselves, figuratively speaking, above camels, far above donkeys, and scornful of motor-cars, in which it was irreverent to charge up to the Great Pyramid as if to the door of a café. We walked, and Monny still lent herself to me; but she no longer bubbled over with delight at everything. A subdued mood was upon her, and her eyes looked sad, even anxious, in the translucent light which was not so much like earthly moonlight as the beginning of sunrise in some far, magic dreamland. She had the pathetic air of a spoiled child who begins suddenly, if only vaguely, to realize that it cannot have everything it wants in the world. And she merely smiled when I told her how, to insure the peace of the desert, I had offered a prize of a large blue scarab as big as a paperweight, for that member of the Set who did not even say "Oh!" to the Sphinx. "Antoun" had "vetted" the alleged scarab and pronounced it a modern forgery; but nobody else knew that, and as a prize it was popular.
The sky had that clear pale blue of dawn, when day first realizes that, though born of night, it is no longer night. Casseopeia's Chair and Orion were being tossed about the burning heavens like golden furniture out of a house on fire; and one great star-jewel had fallen on the apex of cruel Khufu's Pyramid. I should have liked to believe it was Sirius, the "lucky" star sacred to Isis and Hathor; but Monny's schoolgirl knowledge of astronomy bereft me of that innocent pleasure. No wonder that the ancient Egyptians, with such jewels in their blue treasure-house, were famous astrologers and astronomers before the days when Rameses' daughter found Moses in the bulrushes of Roda Island!
The stars spoke to us as we walked, soft-footed, through the sand; and the pure wind of the desert spoke other words of the same language, the language of the Universe and of Nature. Here and there yellow lights in a distant camp flashed out like fireflies; far away across the billowing sands, rocks bleached like bone gave an effect of surf on an unseen shore; now and then a silent, swift-moving Arab stealing out of shadow, might have been the White Woman who haunts the Sphinx, hurrying to a fatal tryst: and the Great Pyramid seemed to float between desert sand and cloudless sky like the golden palace of Aladdin being transported through air by the Geni of the Lamp. There never was such gold as this gold of sand and pyramids, under the moon! We said that it was like condensed sun rays, so vivid, so bright, that the moon could not steal its colour. Cloudlike white figures were running up Khufu's geometric mountain; Arabs expecting money when they should come leaping down, whole or in pieces. And the khaki uniforms of British soldiers mounting or descending for their own stolid amusement, made the Pyramid itself seem to be writhing, so like was the colour of the cloth to that of the stone. No use being angry because the monument was crawling with Tommies! The Pyramids were as much theirs as ours. And probably Napoleon's soldiers spent their moonlit evenings in the same way; a thought which somehow made the thing seem less intolerable.
We climbed to the vast platform of the Ghizeh Pyramids, and then plunged into the billows of the desert, in quest of the Sphinx. Sir Marcus was entitled to call himself the pioneer, but we needed no one to show us the way. It was but too clearly indicated by the bands of pilgrims, going or returning. And among the latter were those whom Monny callously referred to as "poor Lord Ernest's crowd." Miss Hassett-Bean and the Biddell girls made us linger, with sand trickling over the tops of our shoes, while they poured into our ears their impressions of the Sphinx. Miss H. B. thought that She (with a capital S) was a combination of Goddess, Prophetess, and Mystery. Enid thought she was like an Irish washerwoman making a face; and Elaine said she was the image of their bulldog at home. Monny (after a sandy introduction) listened to these verbal vandalisms in horrified silence. I could see that she was exerting herself, for my sake, to be civil to my charges (who were more interested in her than they had been in the Sphinx), and that, if she could have done so without hurting their feelings, she would have struck them dead. But my fears that their mental suggestions might obsess her were baseless. She did not speak when the golden billows parted to give us a first vision of the great Mystery of the Desert. I had led Monny by a roundabout way, and instead of seeing the Sphinx from the back, we came upon her face to face, as she gazed with her wonderful, all-knowing eyes, straight into that world beyond knowledge which lies somewhere east of the moon. Veiled by the night in silver and blue, with a proud lift of the head, she faced past and future, which were one for her, and the present, nothing. The moon gave back for a few hours all her lost loveliness, of which men had robbed her, seeming miraculously to restore the broken features, whole and beautiful as they had been in her youth before history began. It was as if in the moon's rays were silver hands, mending the marred majesty, giving life to the eyes and to the haunting, secret smile. I thought of the story of King Harmachis: how he dreamed that the Sphinx came to him, saying that the sand pressed upon her, and she could not breathe. Nobody since his day had for long left her buried!
"What does it mean to you?" I broke the silence to ask.
"I don't know," Monny said. "All I know is that she's more wonderful than I expected, and as beautiful as the loveliest marble Venus of Italy, though a thousand times greater—if one perfect thing can be greater than another. She's so great that I don't think she can be meant to be a woman—or even a man. She is like a soul carved in stone."
"All in a moment you have guessed the riddle!" I exclaimed, liking and understanding the girl better than I had liked or understood her yet. "I believe that's the secret of the Sphinx. The king who had this stupendous idea, and caused it to be carried out, said to some inspired sculptor, 'Make for me from the rock of the desert, a portrait, not of me as I am seen by men, in my mortal part or Khat, for that can be placed elsewhere; but an image of my real self, my soul or Ka, looking past the small things of this world into eternity, which lies beyond this desert and all deserts.' Then the sculptor made the Sphinx, and gave it such grandeur, such mystery of countenance that instinctively the souls of people recognized the soul look. You have a soul, and it told you the secret. Only those who have no souls find the Sphinx heavy or hideous, or utterly beyond their comprehension."
"Have I a soul?" Monny asked, dreamily. "Men I've known have told me I haven't. Yet sometimes I've thought I felt it fluttering. And if I have a soul, I shall find it in Egypt. Oh, I shall! Something—yes, the Sphinx herself!—tells me that."
I was tempted to ask "What about a heart?" And then—in a violent hurry, before anybody came—to mention my own, into which the moon seemed pouring a little of the honey it had brought for the Sphinx. I did feel that some one owed a moonlight proposal under the Sphinx's nose (or the place where its nose had been) to such a girl as Monny. Her Egyptian experience could never be perfect and complete unless she were proposed to on the night of the full moon, with the Sphinx's blessing; and as no better man was here to do it, I could not be thought conceited if I took the duty upon myself. Besides, Brigit would so thoroughly approve!