There they sit as they have sat for centuries looking out upon the plain of Thebes and across the Nile to Luxor. What stories they might tell were they possessed of memory and the power of articulation; more than thirty centuries of the world’s history rest behind those stony lips; more than three thousand years have come and gone since first these forms were fashioned.
History and tradition say that sounds issued from it when the rays of the rising sun fell upon its face; one authority says these sounds were musical, and others that they resembled the snapping of a bow-string or a blow upon a piece of metal. The statue was very fastidious in its youth, and many times when distinguished persons came hands of man and placed where we find them to-day. The city they once adorned has crumbled to dust and disappeared, and they sit alone and uncared for, save when some passing stranger drawn by curiosity comes and gazes irreverently upon them and glances at the ground they have watched and guarded so long.
One of these statues is the famous Vocal Memnon which orators and poets have frequently drawn upon for illustrations and from distant lands to see it, not a sound could be heard from it. Sometimes when Grand Moguls like the Emperor Hadrian and other heavy swells came along it was more complaisant, and ventured to let itself out, and on a few occasions it even sounded twice, a circumstance which ought to have been regarded with more suspicion than the absence of a date to Mr. Pickwick’s note announcing his non-return to dinner.
There can be but little doubt that the sound was a trick of the priests, as there is a stone in the lap of the statue and behind it is a niche where a person could be completely concealed from the view of the crowd below.