Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/92

74 fears it is the Sphinx; for apparently neither Time nor those forces of Nature with which Time conspires have permanent power over it. The Libyan sands have for ages threatened to submerge it. Their wind-blown masses are even now heaped high upon the back of the couchant figure and have buried one of those gigantic paws between which there stood once an open shrine. It is more than 3000 years since Thothmes was commanded in a dream by his "divine father." Ra-Harmachis, whose effigy it is, to clear away the encroachments of the desert. Man, moreover, has reinforced the hostility of Nature by his own puny efforts at destruction. The face of the Sphinx has been mutilated by Moslem fanaticism within comparatively recent times, and the brutal Mamelukes used it for a target. But the power of these upstart barbarians, its last assailants, was swept away in blood by Mohammed Ali on the fatal 1st of March, 1811; and the Sphinx remains, still fixing