Now perhaps it was the word “priests” that I carried away with me through the darkness of another flight in time.  Perhaps it was the cue.  More probably it was a mere coincidence.  At any rate I awoke, lying upon a rough rocky floor, and found myself on my back, my arms crossed in such fashion that each elbow rested in the palm of the opposite hand.  As I lay there, eyes closed, half awake, I rubbed my elbows with my palms and found that I was rubbing prodigious calluses.  There was no surprise in this.  I accepted the calluses as of long time and a matter of course.

I opened my eyes.  My shelter was a small cave, no more than three feet in height and a dozen in length.  It was very hot in the cave.  Perspiration noduled the entire surface of my body.  Now and again several nodules coalesced and formed tiny rivulets.  I wore no clothing save a filthy rag about the middle.  My skin was burned to a mahogany brown.  I was very thin, and I contemplated my thinness with a strange sort of pride, as if it were an achievement to be so thin.  Especially was I enamoured of my painfully prominent ribs.  The very sight of the hollows between them gave me a sense of solemn elation, or, rather, to use a better word, of sanctification.

My knees were callused like my elbows.  I was very dirty.  My beard, evidently once blond, but now a dirt-stained and streaky brown, swept my midriff in a tangled mass.  My long hair, similarly stained and tangled, was all about my shoulders, while wisps of it continually strayed in the way of my vision so that sometimes I was compelled to brush it aside with my hands.  For the most part, however, I contented myself with peering through it like a wild animal from a thicket.

Just at the tunnel-like mouth of my dim cave the day reared itself in a wall of blinding sunshine.  After a time I crawled to the entrance, and, for the sake of greater discomfort, lay down in the burning sunshine on a narrow ledge of rock.  It positively baked me, that terrible sun, and the more it hurt me the more I delighted in it, or in myself rather, in that I was thus the master of my flesh and superior to its claims and remonstrances.  When I found under me a particularly sharp, but not too sharp, rock-projection, I ground my body upon the point of it, rowelled my flesh in a very ecstasy of mastery and of purification.

It was a stagnant day of heat.  Not a breath of air moved over the river valley on which I sometimes gazed.  Hundreds of feet beneath me the wide river ran sluggishly.  The farther shore was flat and sandy and stretched away to the horizon.  Above the water were scattered clumps of palm-trees.

On my side, eaten into a curve by the river, were lofty, crumbling cliffs.  Farther along the curve, in plain view from my eyrie, carved out of the living rock, were four colossal figures.  It was the stature of a man to their ankle joints.  The four colossi sat, with hands resting on knees, with arms crumbled quite away, and gazed out upon the river.  At least three of them so gazed.  Of the fourth all that remained were the lower limbs to the knees and the huge hands resting on the knees.  At the feet of this one, ridiculously small, crouched a sphinx; yet this sphinx was taller than I.