Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/104

and battered their stony countenances out of all resemblance to a human face; so that the effect of their towering figures and their attitude of majestic repose is unassisted by any of that strange fascination of expression which the Sphinx so powerfully exerts. Nevertheless, it would be an uncanny sight enough, one can well believe, to see those gigantic featureless figures glimmering through the grey twilight of an Egyptian dawn, the while one waited for the first level shaft of light from the East to smite the vocal effigy, and awaken that weird strain of music which the traveller of olden days so often journeyed from afar to hear. To the Greeks of the classic period, with their happy knack of poetising legend, the note uttered by the statue was the sweet and plaintive greeting of Memnon, slain at Troy, to his dawn-mother Eos. To the sceptical Strabo, writing three centuries after that period, it seemed the effect of some natural, though conjectural cause, and one can see plainly enough that