It is cold, but cold as in our country are the fine nights of January, and a wintry mist rises low down in the little valleys of the sand.  And that again we were not expecting; beyond question the latest invaders of this country, by changing the course of the old Nile, so as to water the earth and make it more productive, have brought hither the humidity of their own misty isle.  And this strange cold, this mist, light as it still is, seem to presage the end of ages, give an added remoteness and finality to all this dead past, which lies here beneath us in subterranean labyrinths haunted by a thousand mummies.

And the mist, which, as the night advances, thickens in the valleys, hesitates to mount to the great daunting face of the Sphinx; and covers it with the merest and most transparent gauze; and, like everything else here to-night, this gauze, too, is rose-colored.  And meanwhile the Sphinx, which has seen the unrolling of all the history of the world, attends impassively the change in Egypt’s climate, plunged in profound and mystic contemplation of the moon, its friend for the last 5000 years.

Here and there on the soft pathway of the sandhills are pigmy figures of men that move about or sit squatting as if on the watch; and small as they are, low down in the hollows and far away, this wonderful silver moon reveals even their slightest gestures; for their white robes and black cloaks stand sharply out against the monotonous rose of the desert.  At times they call to one another in a harsh, aspirate tongue, and then go off at a run, noiselessly, barefooted, with burnous flying, like moths in the night.  They lie in wait for the parties of tourists who arrive from time to time.  For the great symbols, during the hundreds and thousands of years that have elapsed since men ceased to venerate them, have nevertheless scarcely ever been alone, especially on nights with a full moon.  Men of all races, of all times, have come to wander round them, vaguely attracted by their immensity and mystery.  In the days of the Romans they had already become symbols of a lost significance, legacies of a fabulous antiquity, but people came curiously to contemplate them, and tourists in toga and in peplus carved their names on the granite of their bases for the sake of remembrance.

The tourists who have come to-night, and upon whom have pounced the black-cloaked Bedouin guides, wear cap and ulster or furred greatcoat; their intrusion here seems almost an offence; but, alas, such visitors become more numerous in each succeeding year.  The great town hard by—­which sweats gold now that men have started to buy from it its dignity and its soul—­is become a place of rendezvous and holiday for the idlers and upstarts of the whole world.  The modern spirit encompasses the old desert of the Sphinx on every side.  It is true that up to the present no one has dared to profane it by building in the immediate neighbourhood of the great statue.  Its fixity and calm disdain still