In a wild rock close by that looked like a lion at rest, the great Sphinx was carved, no one knew by whom and when. Its face was the first human face sculptured in stone. Its names were Ra-Harmahu—the Sun-at-the-edge-of-the-horizon; Khu-Zeshep—Shining Terror, and Kheper—Rising from the Dead.
Perpetually buried by the sand, it lifted its head from under it with a mysterious smile on the flat lips, to see the first ray of the rising sun; and there was the dazzling terror of death and resurrection in its eyes of stone.
Not far from the Sphinx stood a temple built also no one knew when and by whom. The square pillars and rafters of such enormous stones that one could hardly believe them to have been carved by human hands were of black granite; all was smooth, bare and divinely simple.
The temple had not been destroyed and, indeed, there was nothing to destroy in it; but it had fallen into decay like everything around it. The high road from Memphis to Heliopolis went past it and part of the temple had been turned into an inn. The alabaster floors were dirty and the mirror-like granite had turned dull with the smoke of kitchen fires.
One day towards the end of winter shepherds were keeping the night watch in the field of Rostia; the tombs in the hills close by served as cattle sheds. They lighted a bonfire of manure bricks and straw right at the foot of the Sphinx. The night was cold; the tall grass was white with hoar frost.
Wayfarers who had not been able to obtain shelter at the inn settled by the shepherds' bonfire. Issachar was among them. When King Akhnaton had left the City of the Sun for Memphis, he went after him and, not finding him there, set out in search of him. Issachar's uncle, the merchant Ahiram, who was going with his young daughter-in-law, Tabitha, to the town of Tanis on business, was there, too, and so was Yubra, the former slave of Khnumhotep; wounded in the Nut-Amon rising, he had only just recovered after a long illness.
"Blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord," Yubra was saying. "He shall come down like rain upon the freshly cut meadow, like dew upon parched-up earth. He shall save the souls of the humble and the oppressor he shall lay low...."
"Of whom are you speaking?" asked Merik, a shepherd, with a kind and intelligent face somewhat like that of King Hafra, the pyramid builder, whose effigies stood in the temple by the inn. "Do you mean the new prophet?"
"No, the One of Whom the prophet speaks."
"Prophets prophesy, magpies chatter and it makes no difference to us one way or another," grunted Mermose, a sickly-looking man with a sarcastic smile on his thin lips, a saltworker from the Miuer lakes.