Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/88

70 from the almost protoplasmic simplicity of Saxon manners seems a long and slow-unfolded period to us; yet ancient Egypt thrice completed an era of equal length between the civilisation of the first pyramid-builders and the civilisation of the Ptolemies. This great tomb was nearly 4000 years old when Antony "well lost" the world for Cleopatra; it was over 3000 years old when Greek art and literature reached their zenith in the closing years of Athenian supremacy; it was more than 2000 when the Israelites made their exodus from Egypt and Jewish history began.

But if by these or any other methods of chronological computation we fail to realise the age of the Pyramids of Ghizeh, what are we to say of the still greater antiquity of that awful Figure which watches over them—the Father of Terror, as the Arabs call it—the tremendous and inscrutable Sphinx? For the Sphinx, it is now known, is older than the gigantic sepulchres which it seems to