Head of the Great Sphynx.
To narrate all the enterprises of Belzoni would occupy volumes. Let us allude but to one more. He uncovered the front of the great Sphynx—that gigantic monument which has been synonymous with “Mystery” from the remotest ages of history. Numerous pieces of antiquity were as unexpectedly as extraordinarily developed by this enterprise—pieces which, for many centuries, had not been exposed to human eyes. Among other things, a beautiful temple, cut out of one piece of granite, yet of considerable dimensions, was discovered between the legs of the sphynx, having within it a sculptured lion and a small sphynx. In one of the paws of the great sphynx was another temple with a sculptured lion standing on an altar. In front of the great sphynx were the remains of buildings, apparently temples, and several granite slabs with inscriptions cut into them, some entire and others broken. One of these is by Claudius Cæsar, recording his visits to the pyramids, and another by Antoninus Pius, both of which, with the little lions, are now in the British Museum.
Statues at Luxor.
CHAPTER V.
With the progress of civilization, Enterprise took more diversified forms. First, man was summoned to display this commanding quality of mind in the subjugation or destruction of the stronger and fiercer animals; then he had to enter on the perilous adventure into strange regions by land, and the hazardous transit of the ocean, in search of still more unknown countries. We have just glanced at another department of enterprise—the search for antiquities; and the subject was placed in this order because it seemed naturally connected with the perils of travel. But enterprise had taken a thousand forms before men began to venture on great dangers for the attainment of more certain knowledge of the past: the hewing of rocks and levelling of forests, the disembowelling of mines, the construction of highways and harbours, the erection of bridges and lighthouses, of Cyclopæan piles and pyramids, of obelisks and columns, of aqueducts and walls of cities—these, and a thousand other displays of strength, genius, and skill, were among the “Triumphs of Enterprise” ages ago, and they are now succeeded by the formation of railways, and the myriad-fold enterprises of modern science.
How much would we not give for an authentic account of those mysterious enterprises—the building of Stonehenge, of the round towers of Ireland, and of the multitudinous “Druidical” monuments, as they are termed, which are scattered in immense masses over Spain and other parts of the continent? We are left to conjecture for their origin, and our knowledge of it may never reach to certainty. The venerable pyramids themselves are equally mysterious, both as it regards the purposes for which they were erected and the means of erecting them. The Cyclopæan masses of stone which form the foundations of the ruined temple at Balbec (masses which dwarf the stones of the Pyramids), as well as the recently discovered remains in Central America, stretch back into the far past, and also puzzle and confound all human judgment and reckoning.
