The Way of Silence II

According to Audrey Wagtberg Hansen in her article Cold Gods and Fatal Women: The Many Faces of the Sphinx in the 19th Century, Kupka's Way of Silence II was inspired by the poem Dream-land by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), [where] we see a lone traveller on a seemingly endless road under a starry sky, flanked by two rows of stone sphinxes. A Latin text on the pedestal of the front sphinx, 'QUAD AD CAUSUM SUMUS' (= why are we?), again poses a life-and-death question.