The Spell of Egypt by Robert Hichens — Read

One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx -- a bird / like a swallow, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of blue / somewhere on its wings. When I came to the edge of the sand basin where / perhaps Khufu saw it lying nearly four thousand years before the birth / of Christ, the Sphinx and the bird were quite alone. The bird flew near / the Sphinx, whimsically turning this way and that, flying now low, now / high, but ever returning to the magnet which drew it, which held it, / from which it surely longed to extract some sign of recognition. It / twittered, it posed itself in the golden air, with its bright eyes / fixed upon those eyes of stone which gazed beyond it, beyond the land of / Egypt, beyond the world of men, beyond the centre of the sun to the last / verges of eternity. And presently it alighted on the head of the Sphinx, / then on its ear, then on its breast; and over the breast it tripped / jerkily, with tiny, elastic steps, looking upward, its whole body / quivering apparently with a desire for comprehension -- a desire for some / manifestation of friendship. Then suddenly it spread its wings, and, / straight as an arrow, it flew away over the sands and the waters toward / the doura-fields and Cairo.

And the sunset waned, and the afterglow flamed and faded, and the clear, / soft African night fell. The pilgrims who day by day visit the Sphinx, / like the bird, had gone back to Cairo. They had come, as the bird / had come; as those who have conquered Egypt came; as the Greeks came, / Alexander of Macedon, and the Ptolemies; as the Romans came; as the / Mamelukes, the Turks, the French, the English came.