Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/91

Rh upon the struggle of Frenchmen and Arabs in 1798, and more than half that number had been witnesses of the overthrow of the rebel Ptolemy by the legionaries of Cæsar, of the meteor-like rush of the Macedonian conqueror on the richest spoil of the prostrate Persian—nay, even of the rout of the army of Psammetichus by the Immortals of Cambyses. The Father of Terror has seen it all. Of all these far-off historic conflicts—big each one of them with the fates of East and West—the Sphinx has been a witness, and it was old itself when the oldest of them raged out its day of shock and tumult and died away into the silence of the desert. "Everything fears Time, but Time fears the Pyramids," wrote Abd-el-Latif, an Arabian physician of the twelfth century; and the audacious vaunt appears as well warranted now as it did, when it was uttered 700 years ago. It certainly seems justified of their stupendous guardian. If anything of human origin may defy that which all else