and hollows, over which the moon cast a ghostly sheen.
"It's the very same moon," whispered Gritty. "It thinks I'm Cleopatra and you're Marc Antony."
Paul hummed Omar's words:
The moon of Heaven is rising once again.
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same garden, after me, in vain."
Gritty was holding his hand tightly. Finally she turned her back on the moon and pointed toward the empty horizon. "I want to go that way," she said. She had forgotten the sphinx.
They made their way over hubbles of rock and sand, skirting the edge of the black shadow cast by the pyramid, until they had left even the shadow behind. From time to time they paused to rest. Paul was thinking of Thaïs and Paphnuce.
"It's awful spooky," Gritty whispered. "Aren't you scared?"
Paul shook his head.
"I am—a little," she confessed.
Suddenly she withdrew her arm. "I'm going on alone to see how far I can get without dying of fright. I'll hold up my arm when I want you to come and get me and you'll see it against the sky. Do you remember the story Miss Hornby read us about Rumpelstilskin, the boy who knew no fear?"
Paul tried to dissuade her, but she eluded him.
"Don't you dare budge," she called back.
For some time he stood, watching her figure get smaller and smaller. Once, when she descended a depression, he lost sight of-it, but it reappeared on the next ridge. Then it vanished, and he waited, his nerves uncomfortably tense.
