AMERICAN ABROAD
91
which he has been as ambivalent as any other ignorant American, ate
his last scruples overcome, his final equivocation resolved. It is the
Sphinx that conquers him: "Mter years of waiting, it was before me at
last. ... There was a dignity not of earth in its mien.... It was gazing
out over the ocean of Time-....
It
was MEMORY-RETROSPEC–
TION-wrought into visible, tangible form.... And there is that in the
overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone ... which reveals
to one something of what he shall feel when he shall stand at last in the
awful presence of God." But at this point, when he has been converted
however temporarily
to
the religion of culture, Twain looks up and sees
on the jaw of the Sphinx "a wart, or an excrescence of some kind,"
which turns out to be, of course, a fellow American, a companion on
the tour-in search of a souvenir.
"We heard," Twain tell us, abandoning himself finally
to
total rage
against just such an "innocent" as he had all along pretended
to
be, "the
familiar clink of a hammer, and understood the case at once. One of
our well-meaning teptiles-I mean relic-hunters-had crawled up there
and was trying to break a 'specimen' from the face of this the most
majestic creation the hand of man has wrought." Confronted with such
absolute sacrilege, however, all Twain can conceive of doing is to call a
cop, i.e., a shiek, whom he urges to warn the intruder that his offense
is "punishable with imprisonment or the bastinado." A hundred years
later, it has become clear just how ineffectual such sanctions are against
the American tourists' irrepressible need to chip away piece by piece the
Old World he does not quite dare confess bores him; but what else was
there then for Twain
to
do in tesponse-except, of course, to write
a book.
