And this was no small praise from that sublime yet mysterious female who had seen the ages come and go, empires rise and fall, novelist succeed novelist, and who, for eons and cycles the cynosure and centre of admiration and men's idolatrous worship, had yet--wonderful for a woman--through it all kept her head, which now alone remained to survey calmly the present.

Indeed, at that moment that magnificent and peaceful face seemed to have lost--with a few unimportant features--its usual expression of speculative wisdom and intense disdain; its mouth smiled, its left eyelid seemed to droop.
As the opal tints of dawn deepened upon it, the eyelid seemed to droop lower, closed, and quickly recovered itself twice.

You would have thought the Sphinx had winked.
Then arose a voice like a wind on the desert,--but really from the direction of the Nile, where a hired dahabiyeh lay moored to the bank,--"'Arry Axes! 'Arry Axes!" With it came also a flapping, trailing vision from the water--the sacred Ibis itself--and with wings aslant drifted mournfully away to its own creaking echo: "K'raksis! K'raksis!" Again arose the weird voice: "'Arry Axes! Wotcher doin' of ?" And again the Ibis croaked its wild refrain: "K'raksis! K'raksis!" Moonlight and the hour wove their own mystery (for which the author is not responsible), and the voice was heard no more.

But when the full day sprang in glory over the desert, it illuminated the few remaining but sufficiently large features of the Sphinx with a burning saffron radiance! The Sphinx had indeed blushed! II It was the full season at Cairo.

The wealth and fashion of Bayswater, South Kensington, and even the bosky Wood of the Evangelist had sent their latest luxury and style to flout the tombs of the past with the ghastly flippancy of to-day.