Word: sphinx
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...DeMille's glorious extravaganzas have movie audiences been able to sit in rapture of anything as truly Hollywood as "Caesar and Cleopatra." It fits all the adjectives a cinema press-agent can wholesale: colossal, stupendous, terrific. Scenes of giant Egyptian idols against a red, evening sky, the sand-swept Sphinx, the great columns of Cleopatra's palace, are all magnificent, but unhappily they obscure the important element-a scenario by Bernard Shaw...
...play opens some years after the wayfaring Oedipus has been made King of Thebes for solving the famous riddle of the Sphinx.* Now pestilence ravages Thebes because of a polluting presence within its walls; and Oedipus sternly decrees that the polluter be identified and driven...
...historic Mardi gras. Despite occasional rain, the city echoed to the sound of countless parades; of parties and balls at which Carnival satraps made glittering entrances. The Cotton King and his Queen were regal with crowns, scepters, robes and brocades. Memphis' secret organizations (Osiris, Ra-Met, Scarabs, Sphinx, etc.) had princes & princesses of their own, dressed them almost as brightly. So did Memphis Negroes, for whom their first citizen-blues writer W. C. Handy-tootled a horn...
...living gospel for a decadent world, and ready to carry that gospel wherever the range of guns and bombs can reach. . . . And now a whole generation is looking helplessly round for some faith as powerful and as transforming that they can erect in opposition to this portentous, man-devouring sphinx of their own creation...
What did le grand Charlie think of all this? "Silent as the Sphinx," reported the weekly Le Clou, "De Gaulle amuses himself with the subtle game of enigmas." Rumor whirled among left-wingers of an impending rightist coup. "De Gaulle's intransigent friends," said Le Clou, "dream for their Idol a destiny either like a return from the island of Elba or one resulting from a big scuffle...