From sketch-book and diary

By returning from Mulranny by way of Tipperary and the Rosslare route to England you can voyage down the Shannon and have an experience not lightly to be foregone. This is the “lordly Shannon,” a great wide, slowly-flowing and majestic river of dark, clear, bluish water – blue shot with slate. You sit at the bows of the little steamboat which takes you from Athlone to Killaloe, so that neither smoke nor screw interferes with your enjoyment of the lovely scenes you are to pass through. If the time is July (the time to choose) you are at once greeted on clearing the little grey town of Athlone with the most exquisite scent from the level banks which form two wide belts of creamy meadow-sweet all the way to the end, at Lough Derg. These belts are interrupted, once only, by the lock at Shannon Bridge, that little gathering of houses and gaunt dismantled barracks and breastworks built in the days of the threatened French invasion. Near here lived Charlotte Brontë’s husband till his death only the other day.

You will see in the Shannon a mighty waterway for commerce, left to the wild things that haunt it; and it has haunted me ever since that July day on which I saw it with a sense of regret that the condition of Ireland makes such a river out of scale with the requirements of the country. It flows for the wild birds, the cattle, the fishes, and for its own pleasure; and it flowed for mine that day, for I let no phase of it escape me and gladly added its sonorous name to the long list of those of the great rivers of the world I have already seen.

We hardly saw a soul along the banks, but many kinds of aquatic birds, flying, diving, and swimming, enlivened the voyage with their funny ways, scurrying out of the track of the puffing little steamer. Along the whole course of the great stream there stood at regular intervals, planted in more hopeful days, navigation posts, marking the channel for the ships that never come, and on these scarlet signs perched black cormorants eyeing us like vultures. The herons rose slowly from the meadow-sweet and the sedges, with their long flapping wings; the cattle standing in the water followed us with their mild eyes. It was all beautiful, mournful, eloquent, and when the ruins of Clonmacnoise hove in sight I heard the spirit of Ireland speaking to me from the grave.

Clonmacnoise! A mere curious name to us in England. Perhaps nowhere, even in depopulated Ireland, can a more desolate, abandoned plot of land than this be seen. And yet this great monastery and university, founded in A.D. 544, and at the height of her renown in the eighth century while our country was in a very immature state, was a European centre to which scholars on the Continent came to study; which was quoted and referred to by them as a conspicuous authority, and which for long was in what I might call brisk communication with the centres of learning abroad, if “brisk” was not too bizarre a word in such a place to-day. A more mournful oblivion never fell on any once flourishing centre of active thought and teaching.

The slow havoc of time amongst these seven remaining little churches and blunt round towers was one day accelerated by Cromwell’s gunpowder, which has left the “Guest House” of the monastery a heap of ruins split into ugly shapes quite out of keeping with the rest.

As the grey group passed away from sight I thought I had never known more eloquent silence than that which enfolds the ruins bearing the sounding name of Clonmacnoise.

Will the electric chain ever be linked up again that carried Ireland’s intellect and mental energy to the Continent in those remote times, and round again from the great sources of learning there, with fresh material to enrich her own store?

You will have the wish to “Come back to Erin, Mavourneen,” after making this little tour. To me Ireland is very appealing, though I owe her a grudge for being so tantalizing and evasive for the painter. The low clouds of her skies cause such rapid changes of sun and shadow over her landscapes that it requires feats of technical agility to catch them on the wing beyond my landscape powers. My only chance is to have unlimited time and thus be able to wait a week, if necessary, for the particular effect to come round again. An artist I heard of thought he had “bested” the Irish weather and its wiles when he set up this clever system: six canvasses he spread out before him on the ground in a row, each with a given arrangement of light and shade sketched out ready. But when the psychological moment arrived he was so flurried, that while he was wildly running his hand up and down the row of canvasses for the right one he could never find it in time.

A nice dance you are led, sketching in Ireland, altogether! You are, for instance, intent on dashing down the plum-like tones of a distant mountain, when lo! that mountain which in its purple mystery seemed some fifteen miles away, in a moment flashes out into such vivid green that, as the saying is here, “you might shake hands with it,” so close has it come. Even its shape is changed, for peaks and buttresses start forth in the sunburst where you imagined unbroken slopes a few minutes before. Shadowed woods spring into dark prominence by the sudden illumination of the fields behind them and as suddenly are engulfed in the golden haze of a shaft of light that pierces the very clouds whose shadows had a minute before given them such a startling prominence on the light background. Unsuspected lovelinesses leap forth while those we saw before are snatched away, and the sunlight for ever wanders up and along the mountain sides, as some one has finely said, “like the light from a heavenly lantern.”

What those changes from beauty to beauty do towards sunset I leave you to imagine. I have never seen Ireland at all worthily painted. I think we ought to leave her to her poets and to the composers of her matchless music.

II

EGYPT

CHAPTER I

CAIRO

TO the East! What a thrill of pleasure those words caused me when they meant that I was really off for Egypt. The East has always had for me an intense fascination, and it is one of the happiest circumstances of my life that I should have had so much enjoyment of it.

My childish sketch-books, as you remember, are full of it, and so are my earliest scribblings. To see the reality of my fervid imaginings, therefore, was to satisfy in an exquisite way the longing of all my life.

The Gordon expedition was my opportunity, and it was a bold and happy conception of W.’s that of my going out with the two eldest little ones to join him on the Nile when the war should be over. I may say I – and the British Army – had the Nile pretty well to ourselves, for few tourists went up the year I was there. But I had to wait some time at Cairo and at Luxor before all trouble had been put an end to by the battle of Ginniss, which closed the recrudescence of rebellion that burst out after the great Khartoum campaign.

The emotion on seeing the East for the first time can never be felt again. The surprise can never be repeated, and holds a type of pleasure different from that which one feels on revisiting it, as I have so often done since.

One knows the “gorgeous East” at first only in pictures; one takes it on trust from Delacroix, Decamps, Gérôme, Müller, Lewis, and a host of others. You arrive, and their pictures suddenly become breathing realities, and in time you learn, with exquisite pleasure, that their most brilliant effects and groups are no flights of fancy but faithful transcripts of every-day reality.

But at first you ask, “Can those figures in robes and turbans be really going about on ordinary business? Are they bringing on that string of enormous camels to carry real hay down that crowded alley; are those bundles in black and in white wrappers, astride of white asses caparisoned in blue and silver, merely matter-of-fact ladies of the harem taking their usual exercise? That Pasha’s curvetting white Arab horse’s tail is dyed a tawny red, and what is this cinder-coloured, bare-headed, jibbering apparition, running along, clothed in rattling strings of sea-shells and foaming at the mouth? A real fanatic? That water-seller by Gérôme has moved; he is selling a cup of water to that gigantic negro in the white robe and yellow slippers, and is pocketing the money quite in an ordinary way. And there is a praying man by Müller, not arrested in mid-prayer, but going through all the periods with the prescribed gestures, his face to the East, and the declining sun adding an ever-deepening flush to the back of his amber-coloured robe.”

It takes two or three days to rid oneself of the idea that the streets are parading their colours and movement and their endless variety of Oriental types and costumes for your diversion only, on an open-air stage.

Cairo in ‘85, ‘86, was only at the beginning of its mutilations by occidentalism, and the Oriental cachet was dominant still. To sit on the low shady terrace of the old Shepheard’s hotel under the acacias and watch the pageant of the street below was to me an endless delight.

The very incongruity of the drama unrolling itself before one’s eyes had a charm of its own. Look at that Khedivial officer in sky-blue, jerkily riding his pretty circus Arab. There follows him a majestic and most genuine Bedouin in camel’s hair burnoos, deigning not the turn of an eyelash as he passes our frivolous throng on the terrace; two Greek priests, their long hair gathered up in knots under the tall black cap and flowing veil, equal him in quiet dignity, and a mendicant friar rattles his little money-box, like an echo of the water-seller’s cups over the way, as a hint to our charity. An Anglo-Indian officer of high degree is driven up to our steps in a ‘bus under a pile of baggage. He has just arrived from India and is impressively escorted by various Sikhs, whose immense puggarees are conceived in a totally different spirit from that of the native turbans. A British hussar, smart as only a British soldier can be, trots by on a wiry Syrian horse; a cab full of Highlanders out for a spree bumps along the unpaved roadway. I confess I was disappointed with the effect of our honoured British red. What did it look like where the red worn by the natives was always of the most harmonious tones!

See that string of little donkeys cheerily toddling along, all but extinguished under their loads of sugar-canes that sweep the ground with their long leaves; humble peasant donkeys, meeting a flashing brougham with windows rigidly closed, through which the almond eyes of veiled ladies of some high Pasha’s harem glance up at us and take us all in in that devouring sweep of vision. Double syces run before such equipages.

French bugles tell us an Egyptian regiment is coming, and, meeting it, will go by with a dull rumble a string of English baggage-waggons drawn by mules and driven by Nubians, escorted by British soldiers in dusty khaki uniforms; stout fellows going to the front, a good many of them to stay there – under the sand.

About 5.30 P.M. weird music and flaring torches brings us out again on the terrace, and we see a tumultuous crowd of pilgrims just arrived from Mecca by the five o’clock Suez train. They gather the crowd by their unearthly din and sweep it along with them. Beggars, flower-sellers, snake-charmers, tourists, and touts are all rolling along in a continuous buzz of various noises. Perhaps the full escort of cavalry jingles past our point of observation and the native crowd salutes the Khedive. Not so the British officers on the terrace, who keep their seats.

But what was all this to diving into the old city, and in a ten minutes’ donkey ride to find oneself in the Middle Ages; in the real, breathing, moving, sounding life of the Arabian Nights? Then when inclined to come back to our time and its comforts, which I am far from despising, ten minutes’ return ride and the glimpse into the old life of the East became as a vision. For what I call the pageant of the street in front of Shepheard’s was much too much mixed with modernity to allow of so complete a transformation of ideas.

The bazaars of Cairo have been painted and written about more than those of any other Oriental city. The idea of my having “a try” at them seems to come a little late! But if it is true that, as some croakers say, Old Cairo is gradually dying, I feel impelled to lay one flower of appreciation beside the grave which is ere long to close.

What a treat, to put it in that way, it was to rove about in the reality of the true East, to meet beauty of form and colour and light and shade and movement wherever one’s eyes turned, without being brought up with a nasty jar by some modern hideosity or other. This was contentment. You know what a bit of colour in sun or luminous shade does for me. Think of my feelings when I walked through the narrow streets where the rays of the sun slanted down through gaps in the masonry, or, as in some, through chinks in the overhead matting – now on a white turban, now on a rose-coloured robe relieved against the rich dark background of some cavernous open doorway, now on a bit of brass-work. The soft tones of the famous Carpet Bazaar in noon-day twilight, with that richness of colour that tells you the invisible sunshine is somewhere, fulfilled – yea, over-filled – my expectations, and close by in real working trim were the brass-workers tinkering and tapping musically, the while smoking their hubble-bubbles in very truth. The goldsmiths, in their own particular alley, were sitting in the rich chiaroscuro of their little shops waiting for me.

Added to those feasts for the eyes were the sounds which pictures could not give me – the warning shouts of the donkey-and camel-drivers, the “by your leave” in Arabic, followed by the shuffling sound of hoof and foot in the soft tan; the tinkling of the water-sellers’ brass saucers; the cries, like wild songs in the minor, of hawkers of all kinds of things. Then the scents, also unpaintable. Incense, gums, tan, ripe fruit, wood-smoke. And the smells? Ah, yes, well – the smells, goaty and otherwise. They were all bound up together in that entirety which I would not have deleted.

There was one particular angle of street in front of I forget what ripe old mosque, before which I would have liked to establish myself all day. The two streams of passers-by, human and animal, ceaselessly jostling each other, came at one particular hour into a shaft of sunlight just at the turn where I could see them in perspective. Now a splendid figure in yellow robe and white turban, accentuating the streak of gold to perfection, occupied the centre of the composition and I would make a mental note: “daffodil yellow and white in intense sunlight; dull crimson curtain in shade behind; man in half-shade in dark brown, boy in indigo in reflected light” – when in the shaft of light now appeared a snow-white robe and rosy turban, putting out the preceding scheme, till a hadji in a turban of soft bluey-green and pale-blue drapery came to suggest a very delicate emphasis to the rich and subdued surroundings.

In the first fresh days how mysterious these covered streets appear, these indoor thoroughfares, muffled with tan, where towering camels and shuffling donkeys and curvetting horses seem so astonishingly out of place.

Anglo-Egyptians who have to live in Cairo smile at my enthusiasm, and tell me they get tired of all this in time, and they are certainly helping to attenuate the charm. A late high official, on leaving Egypt, in his farewell speech told his audience that that day had been the happiest in his life, for he had seen the first “sandwich man” in the streets of Cairo. Since then another charming form of advertisement from the go-ahead West has appeared over the minarets of the alcohol-abhorring Moslems – a “sky sign” flashing out against the stars the excellence of somebody’s whisky. Can they now say “the changeless East”? And what a whirlpool of intensely Western amusements you may be sucked into if you are not wary. You may hide in the bazaars but you cannot live there, and teas, gymkanas, dances, and dinners will claim you for their own as though you were at Monte Carlo or still nearer home. In fact I have found New Cairo a little London and Monte Carlo rolled into one.

One glimpse of the vanishing Past which I got on a certain Friday at Cairo has left a queer impression on my mind, not at all a happy one. I am told the howling and dancing Dervishes have been lately suppressed, and I am dubious as to the fitness of us Christians being witnesses of those performances. However, I went, and saw what one can no longer see in Cairo. I found it difficult to believe those men were in real earnest, otherwise I should have felt more painfully impressed, but even as it was it was a disagreeable sight to witness the frenzied creatures flinging themselves backwards and forwards in time with the ever-increasing rapidity of the tom-toms till their long hair swept the floor at one moment and flew up straight on end towards the great vaulted interior of the mosque the next. Gasping shouts as of dying men escaped them rhythmically, and when the bewildering music had reached its climax it stopped, and so did they, and the priest, with gestures of loving commiseration and encouragement, very gracefully fell on their necks and gave them a drink of water each in turn. All this went on in a faint light from the hanging lamps, and the heat became suffocating. Mrs. C. put her hand on my shoulder, and pointing upwards asked me, “What is that?” A little white figure had appeared on a ledge high up under the drum of the dome. Whether man, woman, monkey, or goblin, I never saw a more impish figure, and it squatted there looking down from under its hood. I saw many very queer beings in Egypt as time went on, and decidedly the British occupation has not exorcised all the old magic of the Egyptians. But I have never played with it as some do. Not from fear, but from dislike. I am told in sober truth, people who came to scoff have begged to be let go when spell-bound with horror at what they have seen in a drop of enchanted ink spilled on a table.

We have sometimes played tricks on those people with imitation magic, but never more successfully than did our friend Sir James Dormer out in the Great Desert, when he struck the Bedouins dumb by taking out his glass eye, which they, of course, believed to be his own, tossing it in the air, and replacing it. He had great power over them, I should say, for ever after. Brave man, he was killed shortly after in India by the wild animal he had wounded and who sprang on him on his blind side. I think a man with a single eye is doubly brave who goes out tiger-shooting in the jungle.

A much wholesomer diversion than the Dervishes was provided by the then General in command at Cairo a few days later, when some three hundred of the Native Camel Corps were put through a series of splendid manœuvres out in the great open spaces of Abassieh, beyond the Tombs of the Mameluks. I got out of the carriage when warned that the final charge was about to be delivered, and stood so as to see them coming nearly “stem on.” It was a sight worth seeing, and surprising to me, who, before I landed, had never seen a camel worthy of the name. When the “halt!” was sounded, down fell the three hundred bellowing creatures on their knees in mid-career, close up to us, and the panting riders leapt off, their accoutrements in most admired disorder, and their puttees for the most part streaming along the ground. I was in a hurry to get back to Shepheard’s to take the impression down, for I was greatly struck by so novel a sight. The red morocco-leather saddle covers were most effective, and very sorry I was on my next visit to Egypt to find they had gone the way of all “effective” bits of military equipment, and were replaced by dull brown substitutes. Henceforth I was an enthusiastic admirer of that most picturesque of animals, and though I approached the camel at first with diffidence and apprehension, I soon found him much easier to draw than the horse. What you would like to do with a horse to give him movement and action, but mustn’t, you may do with a camel. You can twist his neck almost indefinitely and brandish his great coarse head as you like, and his long legs give you carte-blanche for producing speed. I found out a curious fact as time went on and I had dogged dozens of camels about the desert and made orderlies walk them up and down for me – namely, that the camel moves his legs in the walk precisely like the horse, but when he falls into a trot he moves the legs of the same side forward together. He walks like a horse and trots like a camel! As to the gallop, a more dislocating performance I never saw. Lady – once told me she had, by an unlucky chance, got on a baggage camel with a hard mouth, or rather nose, and it ran away with her in the wide, wide desert. She hauled in the nose rope with the strength of despair, till the detestable animal’s face was twisted back taut into her lap and was looking at her, and still the body galloped forward without the remotest check. She artistically left the end of the adventure untold.

As to the camel’s noises, I don’t think I ever got to the end of them. The snarl and the grunt I was prepared for – the horrible querulous and sickening sound that some one has likened to the roar of a lion and the grunt of a pig combined; but one day, as I was making a study of one of these ungracious creatures for a big picture, I thought I heard a sweet lark warbling somewhere, and I marvelled at its presence over the Egyptian desert. The warblings came from the camel’s throat, and there was a look in his eye that seemed to warn me that he considered the sitting had lasted long enough. The length of his neck suggested that I was within measurable distance of a bite, and I dismissed my sitter and his lanky rider with promptitude.

Of all the figures that delighted me in Cairo those of the syces soon became first favourites. The dress, the springing run, the beauty of the movements – I don’t think the human figure could be more charmingly shown off. The English General’s syces alone wear the scarlet jacket, and deep indigo blue or maroon are the usual colours for the liveries of those mercuries. Our fast-trotting horses now try them too much, and we don’t let them run very far, but take them up after a little while. They were intended to trot before the ambling horses or donkeys of Pashas, to clear the way with shouts and sticks through the crowded bazaars. I saw a lady (alas!) driving a very fast English horse past Shepheard’s in a rakish T-cart, and the unfortunate syce was constantly on the point of being knocked down by the high-stepper. It did not add to the smartness of this turn-out to see this panting creature looking over his shoulder every minute in terror of the horse, and sometimes, when flagging in his run, being overtaken and having to run alongside. I levelled mental epithets at the thoughtless driver, and wondered how such a thing could be. Some of us are curiously inconsiderate. I am afraid she was but a type of many. Witness the suffering horses bitted up with tight bearing-reins standing for hours outside shops and smart houses where “at homes” are going on, when a word from the fair owners to their ignorant coachmen might procure ease for their miserable beasts. I am not enthusiastic about motors, but I am thankful for the fact that they are greatly reducing the sufferings of our poor “gees.” I hope by and by the motor will be made noiseless and odourless, for at present I cannot enjoy its country driving. The scents of the country are replaced by smell and the sounds by noise.

You are better friends with the motor than I am, and have gathered much advantage from its audacity in taking you up, for instance, such rugged heights as those about Tivoli, well within a morning’s outing from Rome, which I have looked at as inaccessible, and only to be admired from a lowly distance; those remote cones crowned with mediæval towns that figure in the backgrounds of many an “Adoration of the Magi” and “Flight into Egypt.”

I am, like you, of two minds about very rapid travel. There is something to say for and against it. “For” it, the freshness with which the mind, untrammelled with the bodily weariness of “diligence” or “vetturino” jogging, receives impressions of points of interest; “against” it, the hustling of venerable monuments and reverenced natural features which should be approached with more ceremony. There is too much hustling nowadays. I don’t know that I enjoyed my last visit to Venice quite as much as usual, feeling apologetic and guilty in participating in the “bumping” of the gondolas by the electric boats, whose back-wash sends them hopping and lurching in such an undignified manner. The sedate, gracious gondola, too well-bred ever to be in a hurry, “knocked out of time” by a fussing little electric launch, which is always in a hurry, with or without reason! What with the hurry, and the whistlings, and puffings, and syren-bellowings, the powers that be are actually succeeding in making Venice noisy. But I have got off the Egyptian track a long way.

After a visit to Sakkara and to the Pyramids and the Sphinx I shall launch out upon Old Nile at once. Our Sakkara day was typical of many I was to experience in this strangest of lands – full of the delights, then new to me, of donkey-riding through the fresh winter air of the desert, but donkey-riding over tombs. Sakkara is the necropolis of Memphis, itself long buried, that capital of the Pyramid Period that looms dark far behind the nearer glories of Thebes and the Temples.

My hilarity induced by the sun, the breeze, the absurd goings-on of the donkeys of our party was constantly damped by the weird reminders we constantly came upon. Those Sakkara pyramids lack the majesty of the Pyramids, and one looks at the amorphous heaps in an oppressed silence. The Tomb of Ti raised one’s spirits by its vivid frescoes showing the every-day life of that Prime Minister’s ménage: it was cheery to see the poulterer in brilliant colours bringing in the goose to the cook, but the final extinguisher fell when we were conducted along an avenue – a sandy causeway – lined on either side with I forget how many sarcophagi of sacred bulls. Each granite sarcophagus was, as far as my memory could say, of exactly the same dimensions and of almost the same shape as that of the great Napoleon at the “Invalides”! And all for bulls.

It was crushing; but well for me was the scamper back to the Cairo train. You cannot afford to be pensive riding a donkey at that pace with an Arab saddle to which you are not yet accustomed.

I am not going to dare to try to say anything new about the Pyramids of Gizeh or the Sphinx; nothing new in any shape can come in contact with these monuments. One feels overcome with hoariness oneself by their mere proximity and silenced by the weight of ages. I am not going to ask you to follow me into any interiors, for I did not go in myself; and indeed, in my progress through this land of tombs, I protested more or less successfully against burrowing into sepulchres, shuffling in thick gloom through pungent and uncanny mummy dust, in bat-scented atmosphere, while above-ground the blessed light of that matchless sky and the uplifting air of the desert were being wasted. Polite compulsion on certain social and festive (!) excursions alone forced me to forego for a while the joy of that “to-day” above-ground for the mould of the dead Aeons below.

I refer to a letter for my first visit to the Pyramids. That first sight of anything one has read of and pictured in one’s child’s mind in the course of education is a most precious occurrence, to be chronicled and set down at the moment.

30th November ‘85.– “A sweet gentle morning; limpid air, lovely fresh clouds in a soft blue sky. We started at 11 in a carriage, with our dragoman, and were soon taken at the usual hand gallop over the big iron bridge with the colossal green lions at each end which spans the wide Nile, into the acacia-shaded road which runs for a long distance in an imposing straight line to almost the very base of the great Pyramid. As we sped towards the illustrious group which we saw rising grey and stern at the very edge of the desert where it meets the bright green of the cultivated land we alternately looked ahead at what was awaiting us and at the ever-interesting groups of men, women, children, and animals which we passed, and at the mud villages with their palms and rude domes and minarets which lay in the well-watered, low-lying land on either side of the road. From the first moment I saw the Pyramids afar off I knew I was not destined to be disappointed, and my apprehensions caused by some travellers’ descriptions vanished at the outset. It is difficult to put my feelings into words as I came nearer and nearer to these wonders of man’s work, so pathetic in their antiquity and in the evidence they give of their builders’ colossal failure to ensure for their poor bodies absolute safety during the long waiting for the Resurrection. The seals are broken, the secret places found out, the contents gone to the winds!

“My beloved father was constantly in my mind to-day, for he it was who with such patience taught us the value and fascinating interest of old Egyptian history, and here were some of the scenes he used to read to us of so often, but which he himself was not allowed to see. “Mrs. C – and I, on getting out of the carriage, first made the circuit of the Great Pyramid – a space of ‘thirteen statute acres,’ I remember Menzies telling us. I found that the most striking point from which to feel the immensity of the Pyramids is in the centre of the base, not the angles.

“We hear of ‘weeping stone.’ Here is stone that has wept blood and tears! Each succeeding year of the king’s reign forced an additional coating to his tomb, and prolonged the slave-toil under the lash – all to safeguard a little dust that has now vanished. This age of ours is about the time the old Egyptians looked to for the Great Awakening, for which all their poor mummies were embalmed.

“How intolerable these three Pyramids must have looked when new and entirely coated with white marble. Their glitter under the blinding sunlight and the hardness of their repellent shapes make me shudder as I realise the effect. Seen in the rough, as they now are, they do not jar, but only oppress the mind by their ponderous immensity, and the eye takes great pleasure in their tawny colouring.

“We next went down to the Sphinx and rested a long while in its broad shadow. The gaze of the eyes is exceedingly impressive, and though the face is so mutilated one would not have it restored. Strange that one should prefer the broken nose and the hare-lip! It would not be the Sphinx if it had the universal Sphinx face as originally carved. Originally! When? It was there long before the Pyramids, and it now appears that more than the ‘forty centuries’ looked down upon Napoleon’s army from their summits. Sixty centuries, some say now. Time is annihilated as one stands confronted with the Sphinx, and a feeling of annihilation swirls around one’s own microscopic personality.