THE SPHINX
DURING the dread reign of the Cholera in New York, I had accepted theinvitation of a relative to spend a fortnight with him in the retirementof his _cottage ornee_ on the banks of the Hudson. We had here aroundus all the ordinary means of summer amusement; and what with ramblingin the woods, sketching, boating, fishing, bathing, music, and books,we should have passed the time pleasantly enough, but for the fearfulintelligence which reached us every morning from the populous city.Not a day elapsed which did not bring us news of the decease of someacquaintance. Then as the fatality increased, we learned to expect dailythe loss of some friend. At length we trembled at the approach of everymessenger. The very air from the South seemed to us redolent with death.That palsying thought, indeed, took entire possession of my soul. Icould neither speak, think, nor dream of any thing else. My host wasof a less excitable temperament, and, although greatly depressed inspirits, exerted himself to sustain my own. His richly philosophicalintellect was not at any time affected by unrealities. To the substancesof terror he was sufficiently alive, but of its shadows he had noapprehension.
His endeavors to arouse me from the condition of abnormal gloom intowhich I had fallen, were frustrated, in great measure, by certainvolumes which I had found in his library. These were of a character toforce into germination whatever seeds of hereditary superstitionlay latent in my bosom. I had been reading these books without hisknowledge, and thus he was often at a loss to account for the forcibleimpressions which had been made upon my fancy.
A favorite topic with me was the popular belief in omens--a beliefwhich, at this one epoch of my life, I was almost seriously disposedto defend. On this subject we had long and animated discussions--hemaintaining the utter groundlessness of faith in such matters,--Icontending that a popular sentiment arising with absolute spontaneity-that is to say, without apparent traces of suggestion--had in itself theunmistakable elements of truth, and was entitled to as much respectas that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man ofgenius.
The fact is, that soon after my arrival at the cottage there hadoccurred to myself an incident so entirely inexplicable, and which hadin it so much of the portentous character, that I might well have beenexcused for regarding it as an omen. It appalled, and at the same timeso confounded and bewildered me, that many days elapsed before I couldmake up my mind to communicate the circumstances to my friend.
Near the close of exceedingly warm day, I was sitting, book in hand, atan open window, commanding, through a long vista of the river banks, aview of a distant hill, the face of which nearest my position had beendenuded by what is termed a land-slide, of the principal portion of itstrees. My thoughts had been long wandering from the volume before me tothe gloom and desolation of the neighboring city. Uplifting my eyesfrom the page, they fell upon the naked face of the bill, and upon anobject--upon some living monster of hideous conformation, which veryrapidly made its way from the summit to the bottom, disappearing finallyin the dense forest below. As this creature first came in sight, Idoubted my own sanity--or at least the evidence of my own eyes; andmany minutes passed before I succeeded in convincing myself that I wasneither mad nor in a dream. Yet when I described the monster (whichI distinctly saw, and calmly surveyed through the whole period ofits progress), my readers, I fear, will feel more difficulty in beingconvinced of these points than even I did myself.
Estimating the size of the creature by comparison with the diameter ofthe large trees near which it passed--the few giants of the forest whichhad escaped the fury of the land-slide--I concluded it to be far largerthan any ship of the line in existence. I say ship of the line, becausethe shape of the monster suggested the idea--the hull of one of ourseventy-four might convey a very tolerable conception of the generaloutline. The mouth of the animal was situated at the extremity of aproboscis some sixty or seventy feet in length, and about as thick asthe body of an ordinary elephant. Near the root of this trunk wasan immense quantity of black shaggy hair--more than could have beensupplied by the coats of a score of buffaloes; and projecting from thishair downwardly and laterally, sprang two gleaming tusks not unlikethose of the wild boar, but of infinitely greater dimensions. Extendingforward, parallel with the proboscis, and on each side of it, was agigantic staff, thirty or forty feet in length, formed seemingly of purecrystal and in shape a perfect prism,--it reflected in the most gorgeousmanner the rays of the declining sun. The trunk was fashioned like awedge with the apex to the earth. From it there were outspread two pairsof wings--each wing nearly one hundred yards in length--one pair beingplaced above the other, and all thickly covered with metal scales; eachscale apparently some ten or twelve feet in diameter. I observed thatthe upper and lower tiers of wings were connected by a strong chain. Butthe chief peculiarity of this horrible thing was the representation of aDeath's Head, which covered nearly the whole surface of its breast, andwhich was as accurately traced in glaring white, upon the dark ground ofthe body, as if it had been there carefully designed by an artist. WhileI regarded the terrific animal, and more especially the appearanceon its breast, with a feeling or horror and awe--with a sentiment offorthcoming evil, which I found it impossible to quell by any effort ofthe reason, I perceived the huge jaws at the extremity of the proboscissuddenly expand themselves, and from them there proceeded a sound soloud and so expressive of wo, that it struck upon my nerves like a knelland as the monster disappeared at the foot of the hill, I fell at once,fainting, to the floor.
Upon recovering, my first impulse, of course, was to inform my friendof what I had seen and heard--and I can scarcely explain what feeling ofrepugnance it was which, in the end, operated to prevent me.
At length, one evening, some three or four days after the occurrence, wewere sitting together in the room in which I had seen the apparition--Ioccupying the same seat at the same window, and he lounging on a sofanear at hand. The association of the place and time impelled me togive him an account of the phenomenon. He heard me to the end--at firstlaughed heartily--and then lapsed into an excessively grave demeanor, asif my insanity was a thing beyond suspicion. At this instant I againhad a distinct view of the monster--to which, with a shout of absoluteterror, I now directed his attention. He looked eagerly--but maintainedthat he saw nothing--although I designated minutely the course of thecreature, as it made its way down the naked face of the hill.
I was now immeasurably alarmed, for I considered the vision either as anomen of my death, or, worse, as the fore-runner of an attack of mania. Ithrew myself passionately back in my chair, and for some moments buriedmy face in my hands. When I uncovered my eyes, the apparition was nolonger apparent.
My host, however, had in some degree resumed the calmness of hisdemeanor, and questioned me very rigorously in respect to theconformation of the visionary creature. When I had fully satisfiedhim on this head, he sighed deeply, as if relieved of some intolerableburden, and went on to talk, with what I thought a cruel calmness, ofvarious points of speculative philosophy, which had heretofore formedsubject of discussion between us. I remember his insisting veryespecially (among other things) upon the idea that the principlesource of error in all human investigations lay in the liability ofthe understanding to under-rate or to over-value the importance of anobject, through mere mis-admeasurement of its propinquity. ”To estimateproperly, for example,” he said, ”the influence to be exercised onmankind at large by the thorough diffusion of Democracy, the distanceof the epoch at which such diffusion may possibly be accomplished shouldnot fail to form an item in the estimate. Yet can you tell me one writeron the subject of government who has ever thought this particular branchof the subject worthy of discussion at all?”
He here paused for a moment, stepped to a book-case, and brought forthone of the ordinary synopses of Natural History. Requesting me then toexchange seats with him, that he might the better distinguish the fineprint of the volume, he took my armchair at the window, and, opening thebook, resumed his discourse very much in the same tone as before.
”But for your exceeding minuteness,” he said, ”in describing themonster, I might never have had it in my power to demonstrate to youwhat it was. In the first place, let me read to you a schoolboyaccount of the genus Sphinx, of the family Crepuscularia of the orderLepidoptera, of the class of Insecta--or insects. The account runs thus:
”'Four membranous wings covered with little colored scales of metallicappearance; mouth forming a rolled proboscis, produced by an elongationof the jaws, upon the sides of which are found the rudiments ofmandibles and downy palpi; the inferior wings retained to the superiorby a stiff hair; antennae in the form of an elongated club, prismatic;abdomen pointed, The Death's--headed Sphinx has occasioned much terroramong the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of cry which itutters, and the insignia of death which it wears upon its corslet.'”
He here closed the book and leaned forward in the chair, placinghimself accurately in the position which I had occupied at the moment ofbeholding ”the monster.”
”Ah, here it is,” he presently exclaimed--”it is reascending the faceof the hill, and a very remarkable looking creature I admit it to be.Still, it is by no means so large or so distant as you imagined it,--forthe fact is that, as it wriggles its way up this thread, which somespider has wrought along the window-sash, I find it to be about thesixteenth of an inch in its extreme length, and also about the sixteenthof an inch distant from the pupil of my eye.”