The Jade Sphinx
It was not. Well, it was shiny stone. Jade, highly polished, to be precise. Many tons of it, in the form of a sphinx-like statue -- a quadrupedal animal body, front paws extended, with the face of, not a human, nor a cat, but what appeared to be an owl, wearing an ornate headdress that did not precisely align with any Baseline cultures. It was 225 feet long, and 70 feet from the highest point of the headdress to the base, and varied in width from 65 feet at the 'shoulders' and 'hips' to 50 feet along the 'torso'.
Unlike the Sphinx of Egypt, this was clearly not sculpted from a pre-existing bit of landscape, but was wholly artificial. To casual inspection, it looked like a single piece of green stone, polished smooth, and very hard -- there were no signs of either tools or erosion. "Jade" was descriptive, not scientific; the mineral composition remains unanalyzed.
Several days were spent exploring in ever-wider circles. The desert stretched at least 200 miles in every direction. No life larger than some hairless rats was discovered; there were patches of hardy scrub plants, and things that ate them, a range of highly irritating insects, some small reptiles, and so on. Nothing bigger. No tools, ruins, or even bones of whoever or whatever might have built it. Wonderment soon turned to boredom and frustration.
For the first-in, at any rate. The dendrigeologist who got called in was frustrated, too, but not bored. Their frustration was due to having too many questions and no answers. Extremely careful analysis using sonics and x-rays showed the sculpture was not a single piece of stone, but thousands of smaller pieces, which seemed to have been partially molten, fused, and then polished using some indetermine technology. Whatever it was, it was harder than diamond. Age could not even be guessed at; it could have been buried for thousands of years and then uncovered, or it could have been built a month ago, or anything in between.
For now, solar-powered drones circle it, programmed to fly for the breach point if they detect anything bigger than a sand-rat in the area, or if their self-diagnostics indicate potential failure. In the past two months, one drone has simply vanished; the others have functioned normally and recorded nothing amiss regarding their lost companion.
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