Named for What Was Gone

The stone they cut for the Sphinx was a sea floor first: shells, silt, and the long thin jaws of something that fed in the shallows forty-five million years ago, and lay down.

The quarrymen wanted blocks that would stand. Giza went up in it, and most of old Cairo, laid course on course from the bed of a water no one had seen.

In the 1920s a skull came out of that stone. Someone gave it the nearest name, the false gharial's, and it kept that name for the better part of a century.

Now a scanner has looked inside it and found it was its own animal all along. The tip of the snout is gone, the way the Sphinx's nose is gone, and they named it for that: Heru, the god who may have been the face.

Of everything to match it by, they took the missing part. Not the jaw that held, but the end that broke off somewhere and stayed not there, in the sea, in the stone, under the wrong name, until it was the one thing they shared.