I debated in that district, as to whether they would not be faintly surprised to find such a monument during their quiet rambles in a country churchyard.  I asked whether each one of them, if he had such a tombstone in the family, would not feel it natural, if hardly necessary, to point it out; and that with a certain pride.  The same principle of the higher realism applies to those who are disappointed with the sight of the Sphinx.  The Sphinx really exceeds expectations because it escapes expectations.  Monuments commonly look impressive when they are high and often when they are distant.  The Sphinx is really unexpected, because it is found suddenly in a hollow, and unnaturally near.  Its face is turned away; and the effect is as creepy as coming into a room apparently empty, and finding somebody as still as the furniture.  Or it is as if one found a lion couchant in that hole in the sand; as indeed the buried part of the monster is in the form of a couchant lion.  If it was a real lion it would hardly be less arresting merely because it was near; nor could the first emotion of the traveller be adequately described as disappointment.  In such cases there is generally some profit in looking at the monument a second time, or even at our own sensations a second time.  So I reasoned, striving with wild critics in the wilderness; but the only part of the debate which is relevant here can be expressed in the statement that I do think the Pyramid big, for the deep and simple reason that it is bigger than I am.  I delicately suggested to those who were disappointed in the Sphinx that it was just possible that the Sphinx was disappointed in them.  The Sphinx has seen Julius Caesar; it has very probably seen St. Francis, when he brought his flaming charity to Egypt; it has certainly looked, in the first high days of the revolutionary victories, on the face of the young Napoleon.  Is it not barely possible, I hinted to my friends and fellow-tourists, that after these experiences, it might be a little depressed at the sight of you and me?  But as I say, I only reintroduce my remarks in connection with a greater matter than these dead things of the desert; in connection with a tomb to which even the Pyramids are but titanic lumber, and a presence greater than the Sphinx, since it is not only a riddle but an answer.

Before I go on to deeper defences of any such cult or culture, I wish first to note a sort of test for the first impressions of an ordinary tourist like myself, to whom much that is really full of an archaic strength may seem merely stiff, or much that really deals with a deep devotional psychology may seem merely distorted.  In short I would put myself in the position of the educated Englishman who does quite honestly receive a mere impression of idolatry.  Incidentally, I may remark, it is the educated Englishman who is the idolater.  It is he who only reverences the place, and does not reverence the reverence for the place.  It is he who is supremely concerned about whether a mere object is old or new, or whether a mere ornament is gold or gilt.  In other words, it is he who values the visible things rather than the invisible; for no sane man can doubt that invisible things are vivid to the priests and pilgrims of these shrines.