“Tell Felix, dear, about the time you met the nephew—­horrid creature—­in the Valley of the Kings,” he heard his wife say presently.  And Mansfield told it plainly enough, evidently glad to get it done, though.

“It was some years ago now, and I didn’t know who he was then, or anything about him.  I don’t know much more now—­except that he’s a dangerous sort of charlatan-devil, I think.  But I came across him one night up there by Thebes in the Valley of the Kings—­you know, where they buried all their Johnnies with so much magnificence and processions and masses, and all the rest.  It’s the most astounding, the most haunted place you ever saw, gloomy, silent, full of gorgeous lights and shadows that seem alive—­terribly impressive; it makes you creep and shudder.  You feel old Egypt watching you.”

“Get on, dear,” said his wife.

“Well, I was coming home late on a blasted lazy donkey, dog-tired into the bargain, when my donkey boy suddenly ran for his life and left me alone.  It was after sunset.  The sand was red and shining, and the big cliffs sort of fiery.  And my donkey stuck its four feet in the ground and wouldn’t budge.  Then, about fifty yards away, I saw a fellow—­European apparently—­doing something—­Heaven knows what, for I can’t describe it—­among the boulders that lie all over the ground there.  Ceremony, I suppose you’d call it.  I was so interested that at first I watched.  Then I saw he wasn’t alone.  There were a lot of moving things round him, towering big things, that came and went like shadows.  That twilight is fearfully bewildering; perspective changes, and distance gets all confused.  It’s fearfully hard to see properly.  I only remember that I got off my donkey and went up closer, and when I was within a dozen yards of him—­well, it sounds such rot, you know, but I swear the things suddenly rushed off and 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.