Slowly, carefully, the eight robed workers haul the 440-pound stone to the Sphinx's left flank and ease it into place, mimicking the technique of the beast's builders 4,500 years ago.
This week, the workers began the final phase of a 10-year restoration project on the Sphinx, the huge stone lion with a pharaoh's face that guards the Great Pyramids.
It won't be like new when they're done in October, since no amount of repair can undo centuries of erosion by water, wind and sand.
Egyptian archaeologists hope they will never again have to face the furor that erupted in 1988 when a boulder fell off the deteriorating Sphinx's right shoulder, costing the country's chief of antiquities his job.
"The Sphinx is like a chronically ill man," said Zahi Hawass, the government director of the Giza pyramids. "In six months he will be better, but he can never be fully cured. He will always need attention."
The colossal figure derives its English name from a Greek mythological beast with a woman's head and lion's body. In Arabic, it's known as Abu el-Hol, or Father of Terror.
The body of the 242-foot reclining lion was formed by laying quarried limestone over a natural outcrop. Claws were carved into its paws, and remaining flecks of paint indicate the Sphinx may once have been painted bright red.
The face, rising 66 feet above the desert floor, is that of King Chephren, the principal builder at Giza. His nearby pyramid is second in height only to that of his father, King Cheops. Just why the pharaoh built the Sphinx remains a mystery.
Italian Egyptologist Silvio Curto theorizes that since pharaohs believed themselves deities, the Sphinx was designed "to represent the sovereign as divine guardian and sun god."
Other scholars see an astrological connection. At the equinoxes, they say, the Sphinx is in alignment with the sunset at the south edge of Chephren's pyramid.
The Sphinx was buried by sand from the Middle Ages until explorers started digging it out in the 19th century. It was finally uncovered in the 1920s and patched with cement. In the 1980s, more cement and stones were added, broadening the lion's body by as much as nine feet in some places.
"It was the worst thing they could have done," Hawass says. "They not only ruined the contour, but the cement leached salt up through the structure, weakening everything."
Since 1988, workers have been guided by photos from the 1850s and a color-coded, stone-by-stone blueprint of the Sphinx produced by the Cairo-based American Research Center and German Archaeological Institute.
Each damaged stone removed is measured, weighed and sketched. Each new stone is hand-cut by Egyptian masons and put in place with a mortar of lime and sand.
No machines are involved - working by hand makes for a closer fit between stones and avoids damaging the aging limestone. Stones as heavy as 1,320 pounds are moved on rope cradles borne on workers' backs.
"We're trying to use the same method as the ancient Egyptians," Hawass said. "It's accurate, careful and good."
This month, restorers will start work on a 30-foot deep crack in the Sphinx's back, removing 1920s cement and replacing it with limestone blocks. Then they'll try to shore up the chest with limestone patches.
The $1 million project won't give Pharaoh Chephren back his beard, parts of which are in the British and Egyptian museums. Nor will he again have a nose, which has been missing since the 14th century.
"We must keep in mind that it's a ruin," Hawass said. "We cannot and should not try to make it once was - or, rather, what we think it once was."
AP PHOTO
Egyptian workers collect a limestone rock as part of the restoration works of the Giza Sphinx north of Cairo yesterday. The workers this week began the final phase of a decade-long restoration project.