Part 40 (2/2)

Billy remembered that moon acutely. It had lighted two fugitives across a waste of sand. He saw a little figure swaying rhythmically high upon a camel, a quaint, old-world figure in misty white, with a s.h.i.+mmering silver veil--like Rebecca coming across the desert, he thought oddly. Then he looked up and saw a most modern figure in white across the table, nibbling a cress sandwich, and laughing at some jest of the Englishman's....

With a start he realized that Lady Claire was waiting for an answer.

”I beg your pardon. You asked----?”

”If _you_ had seen the temple in moonlight, Mr. Hill.”

”Not Karnak--only Luxor--night before last.”

”Only Luxor!” The girl beside him laughed. ”How spoiled you are, Mr.

Hill! _Only_ Luxor!”

It came to Billy, with the force of revelation, that it was going to be _only_ a great many things for him after this.... Those wild days in the desert had seen to that, with devastating completeness....

Girls were only other girls--and delight in them a lost word. This charming one beside him, with the friendly eyes where a faint shadow of wistfulness underlay the surface brightness, was only Lady Claire....

He wondered if he was going on like this forever. He wondered if he was everlastingly to carry this memory about with him, like a bullet.... Suddenly he felt enraged at himself, at his dumb pain and useless longings, and with a stanch semblance of animation he flung himself into the flow of talk which this pretty English girl was so ready to offer him.

CHAPTER XXII

UPON THE PYLON

Two miles of Sphinxes in the moonlight--a double row of them on each side of the way from the temple of Luxor--and then a towering pylon overhead. Karnak was reached.

Out of the victoria jumped two young men in evening clothes, one sandy-haired with a slight moustache, the other black-haired and clean shaven, and handed out three ladies. The first lady was middle-aged and haughty featured, in a black evening gown overhung with a black and gold a.s.siout shawl; the second was a tall girl in a rose cloak, the third was a small girl, and her cloak was a delicate blue.

There was a pause at the pylon for the presentation of the little red entrance books, and then the gate closed behind them, and the five moved cautiously forward into the shadowy dark of the confusion of the ruins. Beside the blue-cloaked girl bent the sandy-haired young man; the black-haired young man was between the rose-cloaked girl and the lady with the Roman nose.

”You must be our dragoman, Mr. Hill; I understand you are up on all this,” said the lady, adhering closely to his side. ”Where are we now?”

”Temple of Khonsu,” said Billy with bitter brevity. Ahead of them Arlee's blonde head was uptilted toward Falconer's remarks.

”Khonsu? I never heard of him! Or is it her?” Lady Claire laughingly demanded.

”Khonsu is the son of the G.o.d, Amon, or Amon-Ra, and the G.o.ddess, Mut, and so is the third person of the trinity of Thebes,” Billy pedagogically recited, his eyes on the little white shoes ahead picking their delicate way over the fallen stones. ”This temple at Karnak is the temple of the G.o.d Amon, and so it was natural for old Rameses the third to put the temple to Khonsu under the father's wing like this--but it spoils the effect of the entrance from this pylon. You don't get Karnak's bigness at a burst--but wait till you reach the court ahead. Then you'll see Karnak.”

And then they did see it--as much as one view can give of that vast desolation. Ahead of them, shadowy and mysterious in the velvet dark and silver pallor of the stars, loomed the columns of the great court, huge monoliths that dwarfed to pigmies the tiny groups of people dotting the ground about them, trying to say something appropriate.

The place had been made for dead and gone G.o.ds, giants of G.o.ds, and their spirits stalked now through its waste s.p.a.ces, dominating and ironic. There was an air about the place that seemed to scorn the facile awe it woke in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the beholders and that fleered at the human ba.n.a.lities upon their lips.

”There are no words for a spot like this,” said a voice near them.

”Silence is fittest,” corroborated a second voice.

”Thomas Hardy once said, speaking of the heavens,” said the first voice again, ”'There is a size at which dignity begins; farther on there is a size at which grandeur begins; farther on there is a size at which solemnity begins; farther on a size at which awfulness begins; farther on a size at which ghastliness begins.' Surely that was written unknowingly for this temple of Karnak?”

A fluttering murmur from the group confirmed this thought.

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