What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem

vivianimbriotis | Feb. 15, 2024, 2:03 a.m.

Marcus Ogulnius Lepidus was a Roman, as if you couldn’t tell – and while a plebeian, his family line had once produced a Consul of Rome. So, like all well-to-do Romans, he was off to visit Egypt.

The romance of Egypt, to Marcus, was all in the Nile, where Caesar and Cleopatra had affirmed their eros, and where the white-hot homosexual love of Hadrian and Antinous had met its tragic end mere years before. He traveled first to the mouth of that great river, where lovers embraced and lovers died – to the cradle of Roman Egypt, the Hellenic city of Alexandria.

The cobbled streets alive with the scent of half-cooked food, the sound of chatter in Greek and Roman (no Egyptian in Alexandria), the sun low is in the sky, watch as Marcus first hears of her. A folk tale, told in a Bazaar, of a monster most cunning, a creature most foul. The death of Thebes, the unceasing hunger – the Sphinx of Greece come across the waters of the Mediterranean to brood in the sands of Egypt.

And no sooner did he hear than spend his coin that night, on cloak and rucksack, water flask and rations. A night’s sleep and he was on his way, trekking through the sand towards the unknown, driven by thanatos.

Marcus felt his mouth become dry. His legs tired. He sat and there were dark spots in his vision. He had only heard to go south, following the Great River, and then west, and he began then to realize that he was an idiot. Everyone knows in Egypt, the Sphinxes are men. He slept there, on the ground, hypothermic and at last aware of his delusion. In his brief bouts of consciousness, he elected to return – first to Alexandria, then in short order to Italy.

But when he awoke, some dark spirit moved him to continue east. To, he must have assumed, his pointless death – there are no sphinxes. His water bottle ran dry and was filled and filled again from the grainy waters of the Nile. His mind was likewise filled with terrible foreboding, and before his sense caught up with him it was evening again. He had not brought enough food.

In the distance, he saw a half-dismantled pyramid. Now thoroughly delirious, he broke into a run he could not sustain. It would take him another ten hours to reach Abu Rawash, site of the pyramid of Djedefre.

She had come to Abu Rawash because it was beauty destroyed by time, and she was timeless. The pyramid had once been proud, pinning the sky to the earth – but Octavian had begun its excavation, cannibalizing the site to build his Roman Egypt.

Marcus’s run slowed as he saw her, but he did not stop. He was pulled by magnetism, a tiny ferric legionnaire being pulled by neodymium.

He stood before her and wept. She towered above, ten men’s height, the muscled body of the lion coiled, the wings draped upon the sand. She was terrible. She was the end. She looked upon him and held him in contempt. He fell prone before her gaze, tears coagulating the sand.

“I will ask you one riddle,” she decreed by way of introduction. Her voice was deep, but not monotone. It had a lilting quality. The sand vibrated and shook when she spoke, sinking him down an inch into its embrace. “If you answer falsely, I will consume you.”

There was no reply from Marcus, a Roman so far from home. She laughed, and he sank a mite deeper.

“There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first.”

Marcus mumbled, inaudible, into the sand. The sphinx sat back on her haunches, dissatisfied. “Correct. You may ask me for one boon, then begone from this place.”

Marcus, trembling, came to his knees, gaze locked with hers. “Oh terrible thing from before time, I ask only that I may lay my hands upon you, and sleep beside you, and awaken safe.”

The sphinx looked quizzically down and did not respond. Eventually, shaking, Marcus stood and wandered to her side. He lay down next to the clawed paw – itself as long as him – and felt the gentle fur. In moment he was asleep.

From time to time, as day gave birth to night, the sphinx looked down, curious, her stomach grumbling. But she did not eat him. Eventually, her eyes drifted shut, and when they opened he was gone. Footprints tracked back along the Nile.

“Curious,” rumbled the sphinx, and the pyramid rumbled with her.

It took five days for Marcus to return – two to Cairo, one to buy food and rest, and two to trek back through the sandy desert. Upon seeing him, the sphinx grumbled her discontent to the empty sky. As he fell to his knees, she cried without preamble, “Who is this father who has twice six sons? These sons have thirty daughters apiece, particolored, having one cheek white and the other black. They never see each other’s face nor live more than twenty-four hours each.”

And upon hearing his answer, she sneered. But paused. And did not eat him. “Correct. What do you desire? To desecrate further these ruins, the new Thebes?”

“Oh awful visage, baleful creature, my request is and always will be the same.” And she averted her gaze as he lay, shivering in fear, upon her left paw.

The third time he approached her, five days hence, she was ready.

“Construct a pentagram and consider its those triangles which do not contain an edge – there are five. With the addition of two lines only, double this number.”

Marcus, never a man of numbers (nor was Rome ever renowned for their mathematicians), looked up in dismay.

“Awful thing, how long have I to consider this?”

“Forty days and forty nights.” Of course.

A journey back to Alexandria was enough to ruin Marcus. His money was spent. His body was failing. He was thin and sickly and mad enough to be a philosopher.

The library of Alexandria held a great many things, and an educated plebeian was able to consume Euclid’s elements, though not without difficulty. Limping, broke and broken, it took him ten days this time to travel down the Nile and then westwards to the broken pyramid.

Dutifully, he stood before the sphinx and sketched in the sand with his pilgrim’s stick. Then, task complete, he walked antalgic to her side and collapsed. A wing draped over him.

He awoke and lay there, unwilling to move. She allowed it, indulged him for a time. And then she enacted her plan to be rid of him.

“What makes a fulfilling life?”

“My lady, my answer shall be delayed and considered.” Wearily he stood, and without looking back walked east, towards the fertile Nile.

It was eleven years before Marcus returned. The historical record is silent on what he did in the time, and he is not telling. He whispered before her, grey in the hair now and bent. That night he slept at her side, the deepest sleep of a decade. She stared blankly out across the desert.

He never left again, for this is not the reckless feckless Marcus of youth. He had thought ahead. With him he had brought three camels (which she promptly ate) and supplies upon their backs. Between Abu Rawash and the Nile he set to work on a small farm. He never slept there, and did not bother to build a house. Every night he was asked a riddle (now always a fair one), and every night he answered correctly.  

He sacrificed a night beside her only once, to ask a different boon.

In her terrible thunder, “What runs but never walks,” and barely a pause before his response – “The Nile,” and then he asked, “What is your name?”

She answered.

And so the years trickled by. Her stomach rumbled occasionally, but she was too bemused to eat the little morsel. She could always eat him later, she thought.

By the accounting of a sphinx, it was barely a moment later when he finally answered wrong.

“Four hang, four sprang, two point the way, two to ward off dogs, one dangles after, always rather dirty.”

And old man Marcus looked up at her, adoring and forfeit, and said, “A camel, awful thing.”

It was a cow, of course. But a cow is much like a camel. Indeed four do hang, and one dangles after. Perhaps he was almost right. It took her all night to convince herself of this, but in the morning she was satisfied that he did not need to be eaten yet. But thereafter she changed the riddles.

At first she just repeated each riddle three times before asking for an answer, to be fair to an old man’s ailing hearing – she would not want to best him unfairly at the last, and eat him premature. But she suspected already that she was going easy on him. She begins to repeat riddles wholesale, that he had previously answered – though he did not remember. And then – years later to a man, moments later to her – she was asking riddles for children.

And year after year, the riddles changed. “What year is it?” was at first reserved for his worst days, but soon became routine. And when even that was risky, “Can you tell me where you are right now?”

And, at the last, “What is my name?” Even when he did not know his own, he always got that one right.

One morning there was quiet, as the whole of Egypt lay still.

“Are you awake?” It is a riddle, at last, that he could not answer.

She ate him piece by piece, stripping off layers of him with her sharp teeth and yet-sharper claws.

First she ate the chewy skin, tough but stretchy, satisfying to the jaw. Next the luscious fat that lies beneath, blooming across the palate – then the umami muscle, tender and gamey. The richness of the liver. The awful bitterness of the bowel. The custard texture of the cortex, brain matter dripping down her chops.

At last, when she was sated, his bones lay there in the sand. She curled around them. Over the years, they will bleach in the sun, and she will come to wear them – a humerus in her hair, his pelvis as a ring, his skull embedded in her left incisor like a gem.

It is decades before another supplicant comes – indentured to Rome, desperate for more building materials, the servant approaches Abu Rawash. The great sphinx cannot muster the energy for a difficult riddle. She mumbles something about mountains crumbling, and the man guesses “time” – always a good guess, and near enough to correct. She considers eating him anyway. She bares her teeth.

“Whose bones are they, Great Sphinx?” asks the man.

The voice of the sphinx is thunderous, ruinous. It shakes the bones of Egypt, rumbling across to Bethlehem and Asia beyond.

"The only man that mattered."

 

The ruins of the pyramid of Djedefre lie still in Abu Rawash, reduced now to near nothing by the efforts of Imperial Rome. The first riddle the Sphinx tells here is the second fabled riddle of the sphinx, which does not appear in Oedepus Rex itself but does appear in some other versions of the myth possibly dating to classical antiquity.