Digging Out the Egyptian Sphinx.
M. RENAN publishes an earnest appeal on behalf of the excavations undertaken in Egypt by M. Maspero. The special object for which funds are just now needed is to clear away the sand which half buries the Great Sphinx of Ghizeh. Mr. Renan says: "The clearing of the Great Sphinx was begun two months ago. Up to the present time the ordinary resources of the Boulak Museum have sufficed for the work, which might be completed in sixty days if money did not fail. About twenty thousand francs only are wanted. "The Great Sphinx of Ghizeh, at two steps from the Pyramids, is, in my opinion, the most astonishing work of the hand of man which past ages have bequeathed to us. It is an immense bed of carved rock, about seventy meters in length. The height of the monstrous edifice, if it were cleared, would exceed that of the highest houses. No fashioned monument, either in the rest of Egypt or in the rest of the world, can be compared to this strange idol, the vestige of a stage of humanity which baffles all our ideas. The impression which such a spectacle must have produced on imaginative races, and who were dominated by the senses, may be understood from that experienced by the Egyptians of the present day when standing before that enormous head, emerging from the sand, and casting across the desert its sad look. The Arab, at this sight, flies terrified, either throwing a stone or firing a gun at the strange being. "The temple opposite the Sphinx, if it is a temple, has also a character of its own. This fantastic construction resembles less the other temples of Egypt than the Parthenon resembles Notre Dame. But that all this ensemble, which is unique in the world, must be of the remotest antiquity is indisputable, since the statues found there are those of King Chepren, thus taking us back to ages which, everywhere but in Egypt, would be called fabulous."—London Standard.