Nor yet for spring;--a couchant leopard has
posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye,
quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin,
clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the
velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the
white, red-set teeth, the slavering crunch of the jaw: but nothing of all
these fired the quiet and the silence of the crouching Sphinx; nerve and
muscle in tranquil strength lay relaxed, though not unconscious. Year after
year the yellow Desert robed itself in burning mists, splendid and deadly;
year after year the hot simoom licked up its sands, and, whirling them
madly over the dead plain, dashed them against the silent Sphinx, and grain
by grain heaped her slow-growing grave; the Nile spread its waters across
the green valley, and lapped its brink with a watery thirst for land, and
then receded to its channel, and poured its ancient flood still downward to
the sea; worshipped, or desecrated; threaded by black Nubian boatmen, who
mocked its sacred name with such savage mirth as satyrs might have spirted
from their hairy lips; navigated by keen-eyed Arabs, lithe and dark and
treacherous as the river beneath them; Coptic shepherds, lingering on the
brink, drank the sweet waters, and led their flocks to drink at the
shallows, when the shepherd's star cleft that deepest sky with its crest,
and warned the simple people of their hour;--yet forever stood the Sphinx,
passionately patient, looking for sunrise, over desert, vale, and
river,--beyond man,--to her hour.
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