When The Sphinx was in her tender years and the Earth was not yet round, she asked the Elements, Of what shall I be made?
Then came Water, in high sea and wavelet spreading upon the sand.
You should not be fashioned in water, said Water, I am too wet and sluice away at the slightest. I was involved in the upbringing of your Mother, bathing her face and guiding her path through the torrents of childhood, but to be honest I didn’t really, I am too great, too deep and too watery in every to get involved in the day to day.
To be made of water is to be wrought in ruin and abundance. The highest mountain will eventually succumb to my incessant freeze and thaw, whilst the merciful rain blesses the wheat field and rice paddy. I am too diverse and inconsistent to pin down, indeed if one were to try and pin me down, I would not be there, I would be somewhere else annoying the neighbour’s cat with droplets on her whiskers.
I could of course fashion your corporeal from the darkness and pressure that is in the depths where giant squad march to and fro. Or I could summon in you the crashing of the great currents as they wrestle the energy concerns to north or south.
I could sketch your outline in thermocline and desalination, but I fear that you would not be satisfied.
I sense in you a need for a more robust and substantial presence. I could carve you from a great glacier once calved from an ice shelf the size of a nice shelf upon which one might gather the jars of preserves, but once melted and harassed by penguin you would not.
So go now hence, dry your radiant paws of sun rays and blink your all-seeing eyes on dry land before the tsunami hits the shallows and the birds fly up and away out of harms reach.
Understood, said the sphinx, I have understood your concern, but in seeing the glory of your ocean waves and tiny puddles in the roadway, I have a request for which I have no right.
I would that my mane and fur may be of water cloaked, as I plan to be the most wonderous sphinx that may impress, and the playing of the light in the harbour between the small boats transfixes my eyes in strange joy that I find hard to describe. It would be my honour to have a small indication of your majesty enshrined about my Persian.
So be it said Water, may your fur forever dazzle the eye of the beholder and allow you to escape in tricky situations like a dolphlin whose skin is forever sloughed.
And so She Sphinx, in part construct with eyes of the wind, paws of fire and coating of finest water poured, came to the last Element called Earth.
What do you want, said Earth.
