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A traveler in ragged robes kneels and waits with his ear against the stone lips. Vedder said he was painting the hopelessness of man before the laws of nature.

The quarrymen of Giza are cutting blocks for Khafre's pyramid when they leave a knob of rock standing in the pit. It is poor limestone, layered like pastry, no use for building. Somebody, and Egypt never wrote down who, looks at the reject and sees a lion at rest. The crews carve it where it lies: a body 240 feet long, paws the length of a city bus, and 66 feet up, a human face in the royal headcloth. The face is almost certainly Khafre's own, since his pyramid rises directly behind it. There is no inscription anywhere on it. The largest statue of the ancient world arrived without a caption, and every argument about it since has been guesswork pressed against stone. The desert started taking it back almost at once. Sand drifts fast at Giza, and within a few centuries the lion was gone to the shoulders. Around 1400 BC a young prince named Thutmose, out hunting, fell asleep in the shade of the head at midday. He dreamed the buried god spoke to him: clear away the sand, and you will be king. Thutmose was not first in line for the throne. He cleared the sand, and he became Thutmose IV, and between the paws he set a granite slab telling the whole story. The Dream Stele is the first excavation report in history, and it is also a job application filed after the job was won. Egypt in those centuries called the statue Horemakhet, Horus in the Horizon, and built it a temple. The Greeks arrived and called it a sphinx after their own riddling monster, and the name stuck to a statue that has never asked anyone anything. The nose came off in the Middle Ages: the story blames a Sufi zealot named Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, furious to find peasants leaving offerings at the head for their harvests. Napoleon's gunners took the blame for 200 years. They arrived in 1798 to find the nose already 4 centuries gone, and the scholars with them measured the scarred face and drew what was left. The braided ceremonial beard had already fallen. A piece of it sits in the British Museum, another in Cairo, and the chin they belong to waits at Giza. Burial was also the preservative. The Sphinx is cut from soft, layered stone that the desert wind eats visibly within a lifetime, and the sand that kept swallowing the body shielded it better than any restorer. Every age that dug it out also patched it: stone repairs on the paws from the pharaohs, more from the Greeks' era, more again from Rome. Rome turned the monument into a proper attraction, with a grand stairway and a viewing terrace. Roman tourists scratched their names where they could reach. The head has stood in the open through all of it, which is why the face is the ruined part. It has taken 45 centuries of wind at cheek height, and traces of the original red paint still cling in the shelter of one ear. Elihu Vedder painted The Questioner of the Sphinx in 1863 without ever having seen Egypt: an American in wartime, working from photographs and want. He buried the statue back up to its chin and set a skull in the sand. A lone traveler kneels at the great lips, ear pressed to the stone, listening for the one answer worth crossing a desert for. The sand was finally cleared for good in 1936, the whole lion exposed for the first time in thousands of years. The lips his traveler listened at now stand 60 feet above open pavement. They have not moved.