Paul Brunton
EU Lib
IL Lib
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Excerpt
Sleep comes with the night, but I had resolutely thrust it aside from hour to hour. Nevertheless, at this point in my nocturnal pondering my eye-lids began to droop in involuntary revolt and my mind became a little drowsy. Two forces were now contesting for supremacy within me. The first was an ardent desire to spend a night's vigil and watch the world with the Sphinx; the second was a growing inclination to yield flesh and thought unto the soothing soporific caress of the environing darkness. Finally I made peace between them and signed a treaty wherby I kept my eyes scarcely open, narrow unseeing slits they were, and my mind scarcely awake, and I let my thoughts sleep away into a reverie of colours passing in procession.
And I rested a while in the serene langour which comes when thought is suspended. How long I remained thus I do not know, but a moment arrived when the colours disappeared from my vision and a great open landscape took their place. It was weirdly lit up with a silvery light, as a landscape might be lit up under a fool moon.
And all around me there moved throngs of dark figures, hastening to and fro, some carrying loads in baskets set upon their heads and others climbing up and down frail poled scaffoldings fixed against a huge rock. Overseers there were among them, issuing orders to the labourers or carefully watching the efforts of men who worked with hammer and chisel upon the rock, the while they chipped into pre-designed pattern. The air rang with the sounds of their repeated blows. The faces of all these men were long and hard, the skin tinted reddish brown, or greyish yellow, and the upper lips, also, were noticeable long.
And when their work was done, lo! the outcropping rocky escarpment had turned into a gigantic human head set upon a huge lion body, the whole figure resting in a great artificial hollow cut out of the plateau. A broad and deep magnificent stairway led down to the hollow. And upon the top of the figure's curious headress, whose wide folds stood out behind the ears, there was set a disk of solid gold. The Sphinx!
And the people disappeared and the landscape became as quiet as a deserted grave. Then I noticed a vast sea which stretched its waters over the whole country on my left, its shore-line being less than a league away. There was an ominous quality in the silence which I could not understand until a deep rumbling sound came from the very heart of the ocean, the earth shook and trembled underneath me, and with a deafening roar an immense wall of water rose into the air and dashed headlong towards us, towards the Sphinx and me, and overwhelmed us both. The deluge!
There was a pause, whether of one minute or of one thousand years I know not; and once again I sat at the feet of the great statue. I looked around and saw a sea no longer. Instead a vast expanse of half-dried marsh, with here and there large patches of white salty grains drying in the sun, could alone be seen. And the sun shone fiercely over the land until the patches increased in size and number. And still the sun threw its merciless fire upon everything, hunting the last drop of moisture from the marsh and turning all into soft dry land, which was burnt to the colour of pale yellow. The desert!
Still the Sphinx gazed out at the landscape; its thick, strong, unmutilated lips shaped as though they were about to break into a smile, itself apparently content with its solitary existence. How perfectly this lonely figure fitted in with its lonely surroundings! In this calm Colossus the very spirit of solitude seemed to have found a worthy incarnation.
And so it waited until one day a small fleet of drifting boats stopped at the riverside and disembarked a group of men who came slowly forward and then prostrated themselves with glad prayers before it. From that day the spell of silence was broken and hence-forward habitations were built on the lowland not far off, and kings came with their priests to pay court to one who was himself the courtless king of the desert.
And with their coming my vision went out, as the flame goes out of a wick when there is no more fuel.