“What is it?” she murmured.

“I’ll show you,” and then, as he turned from the way they had come and followed a winding path that dipped lower and lower between the dune-like piles of sand, “It’s the Sacred Lake,” he explained.  “Perhaps you’ve seen it in the daytime—­but I’ve been wanting to see it at night.”

“I think I just caught the glint of it from the pylon,” she observed.

“You had time to,” said Billy, trying to twinkle down at her in friendly fashion.

She did not twinkle back.  She looked as suddenly guilty as a kitten in the cream, and Billy’s heart smote him heavily.  He did not speak again till they had rounded a corner and their path had brought them out upon the shore of the Sacred Lake.

Like a little horseshoe it circled about three sides of the ruined temple of the goddess Mut, inky-black and motionless with the stars looking up uncannily like drowned lights from its still waters, and inky-black and motionless, like guardian spirits about it, sat a hundred cat-headed women of grim granite.  It was a spot of stark loneliness and utter silence, of ancient terror and desolate abandonment; the solitude and the blackness and the aching age smote upon the imagination like a heavy hand upon harp strings.

“Who are—­they?” Arlee spoke in a hushed voice, as if the cat-headed women were straining their ears.

“They’re mysteries,” said Billy, speaking in the same low tone.  “Generally they’re said to be statues of the Goddess Pasht or Sehket—­but it’s a riddle why the Amen-hotep person who built this temple to the goddess Mut should have put Sehket here.  Sehket is in the trinity of Memphis—­and Mut in that of Thebes.  And so some people say that this is not Pasht at all, but Mut herself, who was sometimes represented as lion-headed.  Between a giant cat and a lion, you know, there’s not much of difference.”

“I like Pasht better than Mut,” said Arlee decidedly.

“There you agree with Baedecker.”

“What did Pasht do?”

“She was goddess of girls,” said Billy, “and young wives.  She got the girls husbands and the wives—­er—­their requests.  Girls used to come down here at night and make a prayer to her and cast an offering into the waters.”

“And then they had their prayer?”

“Infallibly.”

“I’d like a guardian like that,” said Arlee, with a sudden mischievous wistfulness that played the dickens with Billy’s forces of reserve.  “Do you think she’d grant my prayer?”

“Have you one to make?” said Billy, staring very hard for safety at the monstrous images.

“They look as if they were coming alive,” he added.

The moon had come up over an obstructing roof and now flashed down upon them; a ripple of light began to swim across the star-eyes in the inky waters; a finger of quicksilver seemed to be playing over the scarred faces of the granite goddesses.