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‘This way, Lysander,’ shouted Œdipus,
‘Why tarriest thou inert?
Here, where these bluff crags glisten against the blue,
Our fated path sheers. Come!
A hollow of rock is twisted summitward,
Even as I said. From yonder vale we reach,
By just these devious clamberings, we two,
The vile Thing's lair.
So shall we steal upon It, swords alert,
Ere It hath time to turn Its greedy gaze
From the broad popular stream-rimmed street.
Nay, boy, thy courage? Hast thou moulted it
Like a sick eagle his feathers? Come!’

‘Look, Œdipus!’ Yards down, through prongs of cliff,
Lysander's cry shot shuddering.
‘By this dread signal, rolled from yonder steeps,
We are warned! The fates rule unpropitiable!
Fare back, dear friend,
Fare back, though all Thebes hiss thy baffled vaunt!
Fare back, I adjure thee!’
Pity and scorn laughed Œdipus, and now
Impetuously upsprang.
Cloakless his breast and shoulders braved the breeze
With symmetries august
As those the great Greek sculptors give their gods;
With feet a goat's for surety, and his eyes
Radiant rebellions.

The strait ravine veered narrowing till it coiled
A stair whose rough sides pricked his restless arms.
Then sudden, as though your step
Should crush dry reeds, the youth trod snarls of bones
In hideous lacework; some gnawed nude,
And others bloody and ragged, as from wrench
Of ravelling teeth. He paused,
An instant numbed by nausea; then
Dashed on and up, imperious, terrible.

At last the ascent ceased, and a flat space gleamed,
Ranged round with splints of rock, and foully paved
With pallors and raw reds of carnage. Here
Lodged the unutterable Thing.
Here, here—but where? Beyond him, drowsed
With marble might of tower and temple Thebes;
But ere one reached it, one must thread
The people's way—wide-winding cityward
Between two bright streams, Dirce and Ismenus,
For months by this live Horror sentinelled.

Here, there, the youth gazed searching—
Stony yellow, and stony brown,
And stony white on every side of him!
No hint of life, all immobility—Ah!
Yonder a movement! Yellow and brown and white,
Like Its encompassings, a Shape sprawled huge.
He dashed to assault It; but his two-edged sword
Grew instantaneously void air,
While the Shape turned and looked on him.

A lion, a bird, yet human! Œdipus
Felt first the intense monstrosity
Of wings half sheathed, of leonine body. Then
A woman's breast, a woman's face
Dizzied him with wild wonder. Centuries
Of effort to attain the beautiful
Seemed in that breast and visage concentrate.
Massive were both, yet rich with delicacies;
The neck, throat, bust, one lily of regal grace;
The lips, a flowering passion; brow, cheek, chin,
Melodiously attuned and intertwined,
As if their curves were rhythms of some high strain
Inaudible here, and heard alone in realms
Where gods commingle; and the eyes,
For pupil and orbit grand,
Emeralds of drowsy mystery, drowsy fire,
Twilights of eves or dawns, howbeit the soul
Might will to interpret them; twin deeps,
Fathomless and crepuscular.

Rallying from shock, spake Œdipus: ‘Thou art
That pest who fain would desolate fair Thebes.
Thou art goddess, too; else my stout sword
Had not so vanished from this grasp whose aim
Was thy destruction.’

Loiteringly the Sphinx: ‘I am goddess. Why
Hast thou adventured thus
By sidelong stealth upon my vantage—thou,
A mortal? Didst thou dream
By trickeries to o'erthrow me? Look
On these crude records of audacity
Less rash than thine.’

‘I have looked,’ he hurled, still obdurate
Though awed. ‘I have known, besides,
The abomination of thy questionings
To all who pass thee. Nay, if such thy power,
Kill me, as thou hast melted into naught
The sword I had meant to plunge in thy dark heart.
Yet, ere thy Riddle is asked,
Thy Riddle it bodes quick death
To fail of answering, tell me what thou art,
And wherefore, and how long thy beauty of beast,
Blent with thy beauty of woman, shall inflict
Bane upon Thebes.’

‘I tell thee nothing. Guess my Riddle or die.’

With fierceness of the tiger and wolf in one,
He darted toward her. ‘Give thy Riddle, O fiend,
And may the gods befriend me!’

‘Fatuous boy,’ she laughed,
In calm of supercilious indolence,
‘Guess this.’ And then with tones of gold,
Languid, yet savouring of harsh cruelty,
She further spake. What fell from her was not
The old legendary enigma, catchword snare,
That children learn to-day, but weightfuller
With many a pregnant meaning. Time
Was in it, and eternity, and the flux
Or reflux of man's destiny; the laws
Of love, hate, honour, duty, obedience;
Of art, song, music, and the idealisms
That haunt us with such tender tyrannies;
The starry and silver cobweb spun by space;
The whither, whence, beginning, end of all
We have named Divinity, glimpsed vague through life.
And ever amid this awful monologue,
A note of query implacably would ring,
Until at last the tones of gold grew hoarse:
‘You hear my Riddle. Unweave it me, or die.’

A trance had fallen on Œdipus. He stood
Statuesquely motionless and calm,
While some power made of him an oracle,
Delivering from unconscious lips
Largess of truth and wisdom. Then he waked,
As from a dream sublime, with echo and throb
Of thoughts miraculous in brain and blood.

But violently the Sphinx
Had risen erect. Against her lion flanks
Lashed the sleek lion tail; her claws distent
Rasped the tough rock; strange pulses woke
In her chimæric wings. Yet boundless burned
The tragedy of anguish on her face.

‘Thine is the victory. Take it, Œdipus!
I had feared this, dubiously, yet feared it. Now
The death dealt many another swings
Back with annihilation upon myself.
But thou, my conqueror, be thou merciful!
Think not of me hereafter in hard scorn,
As glacial intellect with animalism
Conjoined, an individuality
Spurred by its own will to its own crime. Nay,
I was but the incarnate Prophecy
Of what the People in future years will prove,
Half bestial and half spiritual. I flaunt
My Riddle, as they will flaunt their own.
Time thus doth pre-delineate their wild need,
And they will punish, even as I have done,
Thousands incapable of answering it.
But thou art emblem of the omnipotence
Which Knowledge, luminous guide and guard and god
Of man, will somehow, sometime, somewhere, pour
Torrentially, beneficently down
Upon his darkness and his ignorance.
For all is Knowledge; even the loftiest Love
Is parcel of it. We are but images
And symbols. In rehearsal weird
Thou hast slain me, Superstition. Thou,
Science, assaulter of the Unknowable
Until it yields its ultimate secret, thou
Must suffer, and with exorbitance of pain,
This being the doom of all who fight to tear
From nature, deity, what thou wilt, its mask
Of incommunicable reserve—
O Œdipus, farewell! yet thou shalt fare,
I fear me, not so calmly as I, whom now
Morningless night enshrouds. We are shadows both,
Flung on the eternal by the temporal,
And both in shadow at last one shadowland
Obliviously shall sepulchre. Farewell!’

‘Stay, stay!’ cried Œdipus, ‘I am fain
To question of thee ...’ But, with drearier cry
The Sphinx, her vast vans opening, upward soared.
One moment lofty in air she hung,
Without a quiver of plumage hung serene,
As though in fixity perpetual; then,
With speed to have shamed the eye's alertest wink,
Whirled herself to the chaos whence she had come.