The Sphinx

At the time when a dreadful cholera epidemic was raging in New York, I accepted an invitation from one of my relatives to spend a week or two at his secluded, elegantly furnished cottage on the banks of the Hudson. There we enjoyed every possible summer pastime: we could wander through the woods, row boats, fish and swim, as well as draw, make music, and read; and we would have passed our time pleasantly enough if not for the terrible news that arrived each morning from the densely populated city. Not a day went by without our hearing of the death of someone we knew. As the epidemic intensified, we expected daily to receive word of the loss of another friend. In the end, we greeted every messenger with trembling and fear. Even the southern wind itself seemed heavy with death. The thought of the dreadful calamity that had befallen the great city completely possessed me. I could neither think nor speak of anything else, and in my sleep I was haunted by nightmares. Although my host was of a calmer disposition, he too grew despondent, yet he did his utmost to encourage me. His broad philosophical mind was never swayed by imagination. The terrible events depressed him, but he did not fear the specters they produced.

His attempts to dispel my extraordinary gloom were unsuccessful, chiefly because of several books I found in his library. Their contents were such as to awaken the seeds of hereditary superstition that lay dormant in my soul. I read these books without my friend’s knowledge, and he often could not understand the source of the dark images that oppressed my imagination.

A favorite subject of our conversations was the popular belief in omens—a belief I was then almost prepared to defend in earnest—and long, lively debates would arise between us. My friend maintained that such beliefs had no foundation whatsoever, while I argued that a feeling so widespread and spontaneously arising among the people must contain some measure of truth and deserved serious consideration.

The fact is that shortly after my arrival at the cottage, an incident occurred to me so inexplicable and so filled with ominous meaning that I might well be excused for having taken it as a portent. I was so astonished and frightened that I resolved to tell my friend of it only several days later.

One evening—it had been an unusually hot day—I sat with a book in hand by the window that offered a broad view of the river and a distant hill, the side facing me having been stripped almost entirely of trees by a landslide. I had long since ceased to attend to the open book before me and had mentally transported myself to the despairing city laid waste by the epidemic. Raising my eyes, I looked at the bare slope of the hill and saw something dreadful: some loathsome monster was descending rapidly from the summit and then disappeared into the dense forest at its base. At first, upon seeing the creature, I could not believe my eyes and doubted the soundness of my mind; only after several minutes did I manage to convince myself that I was not mad and that this was no dream. Yet if I describe the monster—which I had ample time to observe and watched throughout its descent—I fear my readers will find it no easier to believe me.

Judging its size in comparison with the diameter of the enormous trees past which it moved—several forest giants that had survived the landslide—I concluded that it was far larger than any modern ship of the line. I say “ship of the line” because the monster’s body resembled in form a seventy-four-gun vessel. The animal’s mouth was situated at the end of a trunk some sixty or seventy feet long, approximately as thick as the body of an elephant. At the base of this trunk there was a dense mass of bristly, shaggy hair—more than could be gathered from two dozen buffalo. From it protruded, curving downward and outward, two gleaming tusks like those of a boar, only incomparably larger. On either side of the trunk, partly concealing it, were two forward-projecting, straight, gigantic horns in the shape of perfect prisms, some thirty or forty feet long; they seemed to be of pure crystal, and in them the rays of the setting sun were reflected in all the colors of the rainbow. The body was wedge-shaped, with the point directed toward the ground. It was furnished with two pairs of wings arranged one above the other, thickly covered with metallic scales ten or twelve feet in diameter, each wing measuring about a hundred yards in length. I noticed that the upper and lower rows of wings were connected by a strong chain. But the chief feature of this terrible being was the image of a skull occupying nearly the entire chest; it stood out sharply against the dark background of the body in bright white, as though it had been carefully painted by an artist. With indescribable horror and bewilderment I gazed at the monster—especially at the sinister image of the skull upon its breast; and such a powerful foreboding of approaching disaster took hold of me that no effort of reason could suppress it. Suddenly the creature opened its enormous mouth and uttered a cry—so loud and filled with such inexpressible sorrow that it rang in my ears like a funeral knell; and when the monster disappeared into the forest at the foot of the hill, I fell senseless to the floor.

When I regained consciousness, my first impulse was, of course, to tell my friend everything I had seen and heard; but I can scarcely explain the feeling of revulsion that afterward prevented me from doing so.

At last, one evening, three or four days after the incident, we were sitting together in that very room from which I had seen the monster: I in the same armchair by the window, and my friend beside me on the sofa. The coincidence of place and time prompted me to tell him of the strange phenomenon. Having listened to me to the end, he first burst into loud laughter, then assumed a very serious expression, as though in no doubt of my insanity. At that moment I once again distinctly saw the monster in the distance and, with a cry of horror, pointed it out to my friend. He looked in that direction with interest but insisted that he saw nothing, although I described in detail the path taken by the creature as it descended the bare slope of the hill.

I was terribly agitated, for I believed that this vision was either a harbinger of my death or, worse still, the first symptom of impending madness. In terror I leaned back in my chair and covered my face with my hands. When I removed them, the vision had disappeared.

My host, however, seemed somewhat reassured and began very seriously to question me about the appearance of the fantastic being. When I had described it thoroughly, he sighed deeply, as though relieved of some unbearable burden, and with a calmness that struck me as almost cruel, returned to our interrupted discussion of various questions of speculative philosophy. I recall, among other things, how he insisted with particular emphasis that the chief source of error in all investigations is the human tendency to attribute too little or too great importance to the object under consideration depending on its distance, and that this distance is very often misjudged.

“For example,” he said, “to determine correctly the influence which the widespread adoption of democratic principles may have upon humanity, one cannot fail to take into account the remoteness of the era in which this process may reach completion. Yet point me to a single writer on social organization who has deemed this circumstance worthy of attention.”

Here he paused for a moment, rose, approached the bookcase, and took down an elementary text on natural history. Then, suggesting that we exchange places, since the light from the window would make it easier for him to read the fine print, he seated himself in the armchair and, opening the book, continued in the same tone:

“Had you not described the monster to me in such detail, I might never have been able to explain this phenomenon. But first, allow me to read you a description from this text of a butterfly belonging to the family of sphinxes, or hawk-moths—order Lepidoptera, class Insecta. Here it is:

‘The butterfly has two pairs of membranous wings covered with small colored scales that shine with a metallic luster; the mouthparts form a coiled proboscis composed of elongated jaws, at the sides of which are rudimentary mandibles and curved palps; the lower wings are fastened to the upper by a strong bristle; the antennae are elongated prismatic appendages; the abdomen is pointed. The Death’s-head Sphinx sometimes becomes the object of superstitious terror among the common people because of the mournful sound it emits and the image of a skull upon its thorax.’”

He then closed the book and leaned toward the window in the same posture in which I had sat when I beheld the “monster.”

“Ah, there it is!” he exclaimed. “It is climbing up the slope of the hill again and, I admit, looks rather peculiar. However, it is by no means as enormous and not nearly so distant as you imagined. The fact is that it is crawling along a thread stretched by a spider across the window, and the length of the ‘monster,’ it seems to me, is about one sixteenth of an inch, while the distance from it to my pupil is likewise about one sixteenth of an inch.”