The Riddle of the Sphinx: Solved (standard:fantasy, 1594 words)
Author: Victor D. Lopez	Added: Jul 02 2013	Views/Reads: 3111/2291	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Historians and Egyptologists have long debated the origins of the sphinx, its purpose, and the incongruity of its enigmatic face. This story provides the answers, along with its single most important secret to be revealed in the very near future.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

height. “Keep the camera on the writing,” the Egyptologist commanded 
and wait to be amazed.” He then turned off the lights by pressing a 
switch on the line leading to the dual halogen work lights that had 
brightly illuminated the small room, and the symbols came alive with a 
red glow from within the carved stone. The symbols themselves were 
reminiscent of geometric figures and mathematical symbols, but were 
neither glyphs nor words in an unknown alphabet but a sort of 
combination of the two that was disorienting to the mind. 

“We are about to begin. Please wear these dust masks and ear
protectors,” Dr. Hawass told the cameraman, giving him a dust mask and 
two silicone hearing protectors, then placed two of these in his own 
ears while donning a mask of his own.  He then nodded to the workmen 
and bid them begin as they sported their heavier ear protectors. Even 
with the hearing protectors, the noise in the stone chamber was loud 
enough to be painful, with  the vibration from the dual jackhammers 
rattling their teeth as the workmen applied their tools to the center 
of the door which had no visible means of opening from this side of the 
chamber and, apparently, had not yielded to prior efforts at pushing, 
prodding or otherwise forcing it open. 

Five minutes later as the camera captured the dense swirling dust of the
jackhammers' work and its deafening sounds as the ancient stone gave up 
its last efforts at resistance and a small hole was finally breached in 
the center of the door.  In an instant, the chamber was flooded by a 
bolt of plasma that filled the chamber and shot up through the well, 
instantaneously vaporizing the still smiling Egyptologist, the 
cameraman, and the jack hammer operators and continuing upwards through 
the circular opening to the surface like a coronal emission radiating 
outward beyond the orbit of Mars. Blackest shadows followed, flowing 
outwards like a billion bats exploding from a cave in which dynamite 
had been detonated, evil personified shrieking outward freed from the 
restrictive seal placed what would subsequently become a primordial 
cradle of civilization by long forgotten protectors. 

The carved letters above the breached portal left by the victors of a
galactic war whose final battle was fought on Sol millennia ago, and 
the remnants of whose vanquished hoards, forced to march through a 
portal to oblivion hidden below ground of an insignificant, life 
sustaining planet. The portal was then sealed and a guardian erected to 
mark the spot—using local materials and a magnificent predator from 
this planet to serve as a warning to the locals to stay away from this 
site marked by the gods. With the passage of time and the rise of 
arrogant, foolish men who feared nothing but oblivion, the glorious 
lion's head and flowing mane were ordered to be defaced and carved into 
the likeness of Khufu whose megalomania could not be satisfied by 
building the largest monument to himself that the world has ever known 
by way of the Great Pyramid at Giza. The result would become the iconic 
figure that would spawn mysterious controversies among historians and 
Egyptologists in the modern era with its too-small head in proportion 
to the lion's body, the unavoidable result of having to fit a human 
face and headdress within the features of the original perfectly 
proportioned lion's head. In time, Khufu's face would itself be defaced 
by having its nose chiseled away as clearly evidenced by the chisel 
scars left behind by the ancient defacers of the defacer. Whether the 
deed was done as some argue as an act of vengeance by another pharaoh, 
by religious zealots attempting to eradicate a blasphemous idol, or for 
some other reason, it matters little. With the original warning 
unheeded, this now lonely symbol stands as a pointless monument to the 
boundless foolishness of a now dead race which loosed once more upon an 
unsuspecting galaxy evil that had been conquered at great cost before 
the ascent of humanity, a race which having learned nearly nothing 
since climbing down from the trees ignored a blazing warning in a 
forgotten tongue above a portal it blindly breached. The words 
originally written there would much later be echoed by Dante, inspired 
by the residual record of that prehistoric struggle between good and 
evil and which in the original tongue, as in its later Latin version, 
could be translated as “Abandon all hope all ye who enter.” 

(C) June 2013 by Victor D. Lopez (All rights reserved.) 

This short story will appear in the next edition of my short story
collection. The current edition, Book of Dreams 2nd Edition: Science 
Fiction and Speculative Fiction Short Stories, is available for the 
Kindle and in paperback. Information about the current collection and 
an additional free preview are available at  
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Dreams-2nd-Science-Speculative/dp/1480295914/
ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372698226&sr=1-3



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