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 '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 headdresses 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,