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She
stares out with blank eyes from a roped-off area at a museum in California, a
yellow sphinx rescued from the sands and lovingly preserved as an artefact of
another age.
In
this case, the age was about 95 years ago and the sands were the dunes by
Guadalupe, in Santa Barbara. It was there that the great Hollywood director
Cecil B. DeMille ordered the construction of an ancient city using plaster and
paint. A palace 220m long, ornamented with statues of pharaohs and 21 sphinxes,
rose over the sands, thronged with thousands of actors and actresses for the
filming of his 1923 original version of The
Ten Commandments.
It
was the largest film set built, too costly to dismantle and store so, according
to legend, DeMille had his Egyptian city buried in the sand rather than see it
fall into the hands of a rival studio. Now, after a decades-long excavation,
fragments of the set have gone on display in a small museum in Guadalupe, 290km
north of Los Angeles. The head of the sphinx, found late last year, is the
centrepiece. Almost 2m tall and weighing 136kg, it was the greatest relic
discovered at the site.
Most
of that old plaster city “is just rubble”, Doug Jenzen, executive director of
the Dunes Centre, in Guadalupe, told the Los
Angeles Times. “That’s what makes this so special.” About $US500,000
($676,400) was raised to fund the excavations and Jenzen said another $US150,000
was needed to recover the body of the sphinx.
“It’s
highly unlikely we’re going to find anything else of this quality. The fact it
survived is miraculous,” he said.
Pondering
the riddle of the more ancient sphinx, in Egypt, American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson
described a “drowsy” spirit who “broods on the world” and wonders: “Who’ll tell
my secret, the ages have kept?”
The
Guadalupe sphinx has a similar mysterious quality, though she has already
offered more in the way of answers. At the time of its discovery, Jenzen said
most of the paintwork had been preserved. “This is significant and shows that
we’re still learning (about) historical movie production,” he said.
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