Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/90

72 stony features been smitten by the level rays of that rising sun to which the great statue is dedicated; 133 generations of men had been born and grown up, had married and been given in marriage, had aged and passed away, and mouldered, for all the wrappings of the embalmer, into dust. Napoleon, in his grandiose, Hugonesque manner, told the soldiers of his Egyptian expedition that "forty centuries were looking down upon them." He did not often understate the case in his public deliverances, but in this particular instance he was unduly, though no doubt undesignedly, modest. Why, Alexander might almost have said as much of the Sphinx when he entered Pelusium to deliver Egypt from the Persian yoke, and the Father of Terror had more than completed its fifth millennium when Amr-Ibn-el-Asi led the hosts of Omar to the destruction of the tottering Byzantine rule.

Sixty, and not forty, was the number of those shadowy spectators that looked down