Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 29))

THE SPHINX*

Behold
Where, moored to solitude, immobile, prone
Before One clothed in change whose name is Time,
Like the vast sleep of mighty motion, lies
That postured form of awful vigilance
And dumb and solemn sibyl of the sands,
Mother of mystery, the fabled Sphinx,
Facing the Infinite with listening eyes.
Who, cold and virginal, aloof from life,
Impassive, reticent, with cryptic brow
And mien inscrutable, forever seems
To personate the ruined face of Death.
For she is hoar with ancientness and saw
The coming up and going down of gods,
The wax of empires and their cloudy wane
And all the proud ephemera of earth
Melt with their swarming progenies to air.
Battles she saw, and banners in the sun
Joyfully gleaming; saw insurgent hordes
And terrible invasions, from whose van
The orient profile of a conqueror
Blazed like the dawn of glory, and behind,
The passing of dispurpled dynasties
Into the dark, where they forgot their names.
With presence stern and promontory gaze,
Staring across the ages, stilled with awe,
As from a hill she overlooks the world,
The silent terminal of murmuring time!
And there beholds how Egypt to her doom
Fares down the midnight, how the centuries
Glimmer behind, as after some swift barque
The sea bares all her whiteness to the keel.
And many pass before her as she broods,
Many that came with music and that go
Shrouded with sighs. Now in a trembling hush
The inhumations of a hundred kings
*An orchestral Rhapsody from Overgod, a symphonic drama of evolution by
Leonard van Noppen.

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