And I was glad to be back again in the
forest from which I had fled.
And the Sphinx in her menaced house--I know not how she fared--whether
she gazes for ever, disconsolate, at the deed, remembering only in her
smitten mind, at which the little boys now leer, that she once knew
well those things at which man stands aghast; or whether in the end
she crept away, and clambering horribly from abyss to abyss, came at
last to higher things, and is wise and eternal still. For who knows of
madness whether it is divine or whether it be of the pit?
PROBABLE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE LITERARY MEN
When the nomads came to El Lola they had no more songs, and the
question of stealing the golden box arose in all its magnitude. On the
one hand, many had sought the golden box, the receptacle (as the
Aethiopians know) of poems of fabulous value; and their doom is still
the common talk of Arabia. On the other hand, it was lonely to sit
around the camp-fire by night with no new songs.
It was the tribe of Heth that discussed these things one evening upon
the plains below the peak of Mluna. Their native land was the track
across the world of immemorial wanderers; and there was trouble among
the elders of the nomads because there were no new songs; while,
untouched by human trouble, untouched as yet by the night that was
hiding the plains away, the peak of Mluna, calm in the afterglow,
looked on the Dubious Land.
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