He’s just a kid, in the two-legged stage of life; it is kind of a shame. The dying sunrays darken his shadow of a beard, but the face is young, smooth as an oasis puddle not yet perturbed by the water spider. The clear blue eyes hold my stony gaze, but as always I keep my thoughts hidden. I am stone. That is easy. I wonder if it is only I who can see the misery that pulsates behind that too-calm stare—it’s almost as if at any moment his eyes will burst in a shower of blue nerves and tears. I follow him with my own eyes, because I feel that he’ll be back.
He turns his back on me, the tour-guides, and their flocks, and gazes out over the vast shifting expanse of the desert. Sparse copses of palm trees pepper the fringes of Giza’s horizon, and an endless caravan of camels undulates amongst them. The sand shimmers as if stained with blood. But no; it is from the copper haze of the setting sun—but also it is not; I know better, I who have seen so much bloodshed flooding the dunes of this desert.
The kid doesn’t even look at me now. How is that possible? Does he not know who I am? I wonder if he was awake when his professors mentioned me within some historical or philosophical context. At my paws, the tourists’ tongues merge into one exotic blend I have learned, throughout the centuries, to easily conjugate. But I don’t need to listen; I already know that they are admiring me. According to the more rehearsed guides, I am 20 meters high and 74 meters long, the earliest and largest of my kind. It’s nothing to be modest about.
When the night arrives at last, a full moon sheds its light in a rain of brilliance. The youth appears, as I thought he would. Every so often, perhaps every few weeks, a person like him will show up, offering me some respite from the dull monotony of watchfulness. They are all driven by a different demon—they seek peace, wisdom, silence, solace, suicide. Whatever they wish to attain, they attain. They scale onto my stone back and my stone head, and from Sphinx I have become Sanctuary. Sometimes they talk to me, or to themselves, or to the stars. I’ve learned many secrets of mankind this way.
I welcome them. They keep me from crumbling away altogether from boredom. The plagues and diseases I occasionally motivate myself to amass and deliver upon Egypt become less effective as man’s level of technology and caution increases, and these past few years I grow somewhat weary of the same cycles of cicadas, leeches, and cholera. Perhaps I am more of a relic than I would care to admit. I try not to worry too much. Because I suspect that stress contributed to the weather eating away at my nose.
"Angreek87"
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