d left him there alone. They went
with a roaring noise like wind; shadowy but tremendously big, they were,
and they vanished up against the fiery precipices as though they slipped
bang into the stone itself. The only thing I can think of to describe
'em is--well, those sand-storms the Khamasin raises--the hot winds, you
know."

"They probably _were_ sand," his wife suggested, burning to tell
another story of her own.

"Possibly, only there wasn't a breath of wind, and it was hot as
blazes--and--I had such extraordinary sensations--never felt anything
like it before--wild and exhilarated--drunk, I tell you, drunk."

"You saw them?" asked Henriot. "You made out their shape at all, or
outline?"

"Sphinx," he replied at once, "for all the world like sphinxes. You know
the kind of face and head these limestone strata in the Desert
take--great visages with square Egyptian head-dresses where the driven
sand has eaten away the softer stuff beneath? You see it
everywhere--enormous idols they seem, with faces and eyes and lips
awfully like the sphinx--well, that's the nearest I can get to it." He
puffed his pipe hard. But there was no sign of levity in him. He told
the actual truth as far as in him lay, yet half ashamed of what he told.
And a good deal he left out, too.

"She's got a face of the same sort, that Statham horror," his wife said
with a shiver. "Reduce the size, and paint in awful black eyes, and
you've got her exactly--a living idol." And all three laughed, yet a
laughter without merriment in it.

"And you spoke to the man?"

"I did," the Englishman answered, "though I confess I'm a bit ashamed of
the way I spoke. Fact is, I was excited, thunderingly excited, and felt
a kind of anger. I wanted to kick the beggar for practising such bally
rubbish, and in such a place too. Yet all the time--well, well, I
believe it was sheer funk now," he laughed; "for I felt uncommonly queer
out there in the dusk, alone with--with that kind of business; and I was
angry with myself for feeling it. Anyhow, I went up--I'd lost my donkey
boy as well, remember--and slated him like a dog. I can't remember what
I said exactly--only that he stood and stared at me in silence. That
made it worse--seemed twice as real then. The beggar said no single word
the whole time. He signed to me with one hand to clear out. And then,
suddenly out of nothing--she--that woman--appeared and stood beside him.
I never saw her come. She must have been b