It was so simple a manoeuvre by which Fate began the innocent game. The
woman left a couple of books behind her on the table one night, and
Henriot, after a moment's hesitation, took them out after her. He knew
the titles--_The House of the Master_, and _The House of the Hidden
Places_, both singular interpretations of the Pyramids that once had
held his own mind spellbound. Their ideas had been since disproved, if
he remembered rightly, yet the titles were a clue--a clue to that
imaginative part of his mind that was so busy constructing theories and
had found its stride. Loose sheets of paper, covered with notes in a
minute handwriting, lay between the pages; but these, of course, he did
not read, noticing only that they were written round designs of various
kinds--intricate designs.
He discovered Vance in a corner of the smoking-lounge. The woman had
disappeared.
Vance thanked him politely. "My aunt is so forgetful sometimes," he
said, and took them with a covert eagerness that did not escape the
other's observation. He folded up the sheets and put them carefully in
his pocket. On one there was an ink-sketched map, crammed with detail,
that might well have referred to some portion of the Desert. The points
of the compass stood out boldly at the bottom. There were involved
geometrical designs again. Henriot saw them. They exchanged, then, the
commonplaces of conversation, but these led to nothing further. Vance
was nervous and betrayed impatience. He presently excused himself and
left the lounge. Ten minutes later he passed through the outer hall, the
woman beside him, and the pair of them, wrapped up in cloak and ulster,
went out into the night. At the door, Vance turned and threw a quick,
investigating glance in his direction. There seemed a hint of
questioning in that glance; it might almost have been a tentative
invitation. But, also, he wanted to see if their exit had been
particularly noticed--and by whom.
This, briefly told, was the first manoeuvre by which Fate introduced
them. There was nothing in it. The details were so insignificant, so
slight the conversation, so meagre the pieces thus added to Henriot's
imaginative structure. Yet they somehow built it up and made it solid;
the outline in his mind began to stand foursquare. That writing, those
designs, the manner of the man, their going out together, the final
curious look--each and all betrayed points of a hidden thing.
Subconsciously he was excavating their buried purposes. The sand was
shifting. The concentration of his mind incessantly upon them removed it
grain by grain and speck by speck. Tips of the smothered thing emerged.
Presently a subsidence would follow with a rush and light would blaze
upon its skeleton. He felt it stirring underneath his feet--this flowing
movement of light, dry, heaped-up sand. It was always--sand.
Then other incidents of a similar kind came about, clearing the way to a
natural acquaintanceship. Henriot watched the process with amusement,
yet with another feeling too that was only a little less than anxiety. A
keen observer, no detail escaped him; he saw the forces of their lives
draw closer. It made him think of the devices of young people who desire
to know one another, yet cannot get a proper introduction. Fate
condescended to such little tricks. They wanted a third person, he began
to feel. A third was necessary to some plan they had on hand, and--they
waited to see if he could fill the place. This woman, with whom he had
yet exchanged no single word, seemed so familiar to him, well known for
years. They weighed and watched him, wondering if he would do.
None of the devices were too obviously used, but at length Henriot
picked up so many forgotten articles, and heard so many significant
phrases, casually let fall, that he began to feel like the villain in a
machine-made play, where the hero for ever drops clues his enemy is
intended to discover.
Introduction followed inevitably. "My aunt can tell you; she knows
Arabic perfectly." He had been discussing the meaning of some local name
or other with a neighbour after dinner, and Vance had joined them. The
neighbour moved away; these two were left standing alone, and he
accepted a cigarette from the other's case. There was a rustle of skirts
behind them. "Here she comes," said Vance; "you will let me introduce
you." He did not ask for Henriot's name; he had already taken the
trouble to find it out--another little betrayal, and another clue.
It was in a secluded corner of the great hall, and Henriot turned to see
the woman's stately figure coming towards them across the thick carpet
that deadened her footsteps. She came sailing up, her black eyes fixed
upon his face. Very erect, head upright, shoulders almost squared, she
moved wonderfully well; there was dignity and power in her walk. She was
dressed in black, and her face was like the night. He found it
impossible to say what lent her this air of impressiveness and solemnity
that was almost majestic. But there _was_ this touch of darkness and of
power in the way she came that made him think of some sphinx-like figure
of stone, some idol motionless in all its parts but moving as a whole,
and gliding across--sand. Beneath those level lids her eyes stared hard
at him. And a faint sensation of distress stirred in him deep, deep
down. Where had he seen those eyes before?
He bowed, as she joined them, and Vance led the way to the armchairs in
a corner of the lounge. The meeting, as the talk that followed, he felt,
were all part of a preconceived plan. It had happened before. The woman,
that is, was familiar to him--to some part of his being that had dropped
stitches of old, old memory.
Lady Statham! At first the name had disappointed him. So many folk wear
titles, as syllables in certain tongues wear accents--without them being
mute, unnoticed, unpronounced. Nonentities, born to names, so often
claim attention for their insignificance in this way. But this woman,
had she been Jemima Jones, would have made the name distinguished and
select. She was a big and sombre personality. Why was it, he wondered
afterwards, that for a moment something in him shrank, and that his
mind, metaphorically speaking, flung up an arm in self-protection? The
instinct flashed and passed. But it seemed to him born of an automatic
feeling that he must protect--not himself, but the woman from the man.
There was confusion in it all; links were missing. He studied her
intently. She was a woman who had none of the external feminine signals
in either dress or manner, no graces, no little womanly hesitations and
alarms, no daintiness, yet neither anything distinctly masculine. Her
charm was strong, possessing; only he kept forgetting that he was
talking to a--woman; and the thing she inspired in him included, with
respect and wonder, somewhere also this curious hint of dread. This
instinct to protect her fled as soon as it was born, for the interest of
the conversation in which she so quickly plunged him obliterated all
minor emotions whatsoever. Here, for the first time, he drew close to
Egypt, the Egypt he had sought so long. It was not to be explained. He
_felt_ it.
Beginning with commonplaces, such as "You like Egypt? You find here what
you expected?" she led him into better regions with "One finds here what
one brings." He knew the delightful experience of talking fluently on
subjects he was at home in, and to some one who understood. The feeling
at first that to this woman he could not say mere anythings, slipped
into its opposite--that he could say everything. Strangers ten minutes
ago, they were at once in deep and intimate talk together. He found his
ideas readily followed, agreed with up to a point--the point which
permits discussion to start from a basis of general accord towards
speculation. In the excitement of ideas he neglected the uncomfortable
note that had stirred his caution, forgot the warning too. Her mind,
moreover, seemed known to him; he was often aware of what she was going
to say before he actually heard it; the current of her thoughts struck a
familiar gait, and more than once he experienced vividly again the odd
sensation that it all had happened before. The very sentences and
phrases with which she pointed the turns of her unusual ideas were never
wholly unexpected.
For her ideas were decidedly unusual, in the sense that she accepted
without question speculations not commonly deemed worth consideration at
all, indeed not ordinarily even known. Henriot knew them, because he had
read in many fields. It was the strength of her belief that fascinated
him. She offered no apologies. She knew. And while he talked, she
listening with folded arms and her black eyes fixed upon his own,
Richard Vance watched with vigilant eyes and listened too, ceaselessly
alert. Vance joined in little enough, however, gave no opinions, his
attitude one of general acquiescence. Twice, when pauses of slackening
interest made it possible, Henriot fancied he surprised another quality
in this negative attitude. Interpreting it each time differently, he yet
dismissed both interpretations with a smile. His imagination leaped so
absurdly to violent conclusions. They were not tenable: Vance was
neither her keeper, nor was he in some fashion a detective. Yet in his
manner was sometimes this suggestion of the detective order. He watched
with such deep attention, and he concealed it so clumsily with an
affectation of careless indifference.
There is nothing more dangerous than that impulsive intimacy strangers
sometimes adopt when an atmosphere of mutual sympathy takes them by
surprise, for it is akin to the false frankness friends affect when
telling "candidly" one another's faults. The mood is invariably
regretted later. Henriot, however, yielded to it now with something like
abandon. The pleasure of talking with this woman was so unexpected, and
so keen.
For Lady Statham believed apparently in some Egypt of her dreams. Her
interest was neither historical, archaeological, nor political. It was
religious--yet hardly of this earth at all. The conversation turned upon
the knowledge of the ancient Egyptians from an unearthly point of view,
and even while he talked he was vaguely aware that it was _her_ mind
talking through his own. She drew out his ideas and made him say them.
But this he was properly aware of only afterwards--that she had
cleverly, mercilessly pumped him of all he had ever known or read upon
the subject. Moreover, what Vance watched so intently was himself, and
the reactions in himself this remarkable woman produced. That also he
realised later.
His first impression that these two belonged to what may be called the
"crank" order was justified by the conversation. But, at least, it was
interesting crankiness, and the belief behind it made it even
fascinating. Long before the end he surprised in her a more vital form
of his own attitude that anything _may_ be true, since knowledge has
never yet found final answers to any of the biggest questions.
He understood, from sentences dropped early in the talk, that she was
among those few "superstitious" folk who think that the old Egyptians
came closer to reading the eternal riddles of the world than any
others, and that their knowledge was a remnant of that ancient Wisdom
Religion which existed in the superb, dark civilization of the sunken
Atlantis, lost continent that once joined Africa to Mexico. Eighty
thousand years ago the dim sands of Poseidonis, great island adjoining
the main continent which itself had vanished a vast period before, sank
down beneath the waves, and the entire known world to-day was descended
from its survivors.
Hence the significant fact that all religions and "mythological" systems
begin with a story of a flood--some cataclysmic upheaval that destroyed
the world. Egypt itself was colonised by a group of Atlantean priests
who brought their curious, deep knowledge with them. They had foreseen
the cataclysm.
Lady Statham talked well, bringing into her great dream this strong,
insistent quality of belief and fact. She knew, from Plato to Donelly,
all that the minds of men have ever speculated upon the gorgeous legend.
The evidence for such a sunken continent--Henriot had skimmed it too in
years gone by--she made bewilderingly complete. He had heard Baconians
demolish Shakespeare with an array of evidence equally overwhelming. It
catches the imagination though not the mind. Yet out of her facts, as
she presented them, grew a strange likelihood. The force of this woman's
personality, and her calm and quiet way of believing all she talked
about, took her listener to some extent--further than ever before,
certainly--into the great dream after her. And the dream, to say the
least, was a picturesque one, laden with wonderful possibilities. For as
she talked the spirit of old Egypt moved up, staring down upon him out
of eyes lidded so curiously level. Hitherto all had prated to him of the
Arabs, their ancient faith and customs, and the splendour of the
Bedouins, those Princes of the Desert. But what he sought, barely
confessed in words even to himself, was something older far than this.
And this strange, dark woman brought it close. Deeps in his soul, long
slumbering, awoke. He heard forgotten questions.
Only in this brief way could he attempt to sum up the storm she roused
in him.
She carried him far beyond mere outline, however, though afterwards he
recalled the details with difficulty. So much more was suggested than
actually expressed. She contrived to make the general modern scepticism
an evidence of cheap mentality. It was so easy; the depth it affects to
conceal, mere emptiness. "We have tried all things, and found all
wanting"--the mind, as measuring instrument, merely confessed
inadequate. Various shrewd judgments of this kind increased his respect,
although her acceptance went so far beyond his own. And, while the label
of credulity refused to stick to her, her sense of imaginative wonder
enabled her to escape that dreadful compromise, a man's mind in a
woman's temperament. She fascinated him.
The spiritual worship of the ancient Egyptians, she held, was a
symbolical explanation of things generally alluded to as the secrets of
life and death; their knowledge was a remnant of the wisdom of Atlantis.
Material relics, equally misunderstood, still stood to-day at Karnac,
Stonehenge, and in the mysterious writings on buried Mexican temples and
cities, so significantly akin to the hieroglyphics upon the Egyptian
tombs.
"The one misinterpreted as literally as the other," she suggested, "yet
both fragments of an advanced knowledge that found its grave in the sea.
The Wisdom of that old spiritual system has vanished from the world,
only a degraded literalism left of its undecipherable language. The
jewel has been lost, and the casket is filled with sand, sand, sand."
How keenly her black eyes searched his own as she said it, and how oddly
she made the little word resound. The syllable drew out almost into
chanting. Echoes answered from the depths within him, carrying it on and
on across some desert of forgotten belief. Veils of sand flew everywhere
about his mind. Curtains lifted. Whole hills of sand went shifting into
level surfaces whence gardens of dim outline emerged to meet the
sunlight.
"But the sand may be removed." It was her nephew, speaking almost for
the first time, and the interruption had an odd effect, introducing a
sharply practical element. For the tone expressed, so far as he dared
express it, disapproval. It was a baited observation, an invitation to
opinion.
"We are not sand-diggers, Mr. Henriot," put in Lady Statham, before he
decided to respond. "Our object is quite another one; and I believe--I
have a feeling," she added almost questioningly, "that you might be
interested enough to help us perhaps."
He only wondered the direct attack had not come sooner. Its bluntness
hardly surprised him. He felt himself leap forward to accept it. A
sudden subsidence had freed his feet.
Then the warning operated suddenly--for an instant. Henriot _was_
interested; more, he was half seduced; but, as yet, he did not mean to
be included in their purposes, whatever these might be. That shrinking
dread came back a moment, and was gone again before he could question
it. His eyes looked full at Lady Statham. "What is it that you know?"
they asked her. "Tell me the things we once knew together, you and I.
These words are merely trifling. And why does another man now stand in
my place? For the sands heaped upon my memory are shifting, and it is
_you_ who are moving them away."
His soul whispered it; his voice said quite another thing, although the
words he used seemed oddly chosen:
"There is much in the ideas of ancient Egypt that has attracted me ever
since I can remember, though I have never caught up with anything
definite enough to follow. There was majesty somewhere in their
conceptions--a large, calm majesty of spiritual dominion, one might call
it perhaps. I _am_ interested."
Her face remained expressionless as she listened, but there was grave
conviction in the eyes that held him like a spell. He saw through them
into dim, faint pictures whose background was always sand. He forgot
that he was speaking with a woman, a woman who half an hour ago had been
a stranger to him. He followed these faded mental pictures, though he
never caught them up.... It was like his dream in London.
Lady Statham was talking--he had not noticed the means by which she
effected the abrupt transition--of familiar beliefs of old Egypt; of the
Ka, or Double, by whose existence the survival of the soul was possible,
even its return into manifested, physical life; of the astrology, or
influence of the heavenly bodies upon all sublunar activities; of
terrific forms of other life, known to the ancient worship of Atlantis,
great Potencies that might be invoked by ritual and ceremonial, and of
their lesser influence as recognised in certain lower forms, hence
treated with veneration as the "Sacred Animal" branch of this dim
religion. And she spoke lightly of the modern learning which so glibly
imagined it was the animals themselves that were looked upon as
"gods"--the bull, the bird, the crocodile, the cat. "It's there they all
go so absurdly wrong," she said, "taking the symbol for the power
symbolised. Yet natural enough. The mind to-day wears blinkers, studies
only the details seen directly before it. Had none of us experienced
love, we should think the first lover mad. Few to-day know the Powers
_they_ knew, hence deny them. If the world were deaf it would stand with
mockery before a hearing group swayed by an orchestra, pitying both
listeners and performers. It would deem our admiration of a great
swinging bell mere foolish worship of form and movement. Similarly, with
high Powers that once expressed themselves in common forms--where best
they could--being themselves bodiless. The learned men classify the
forms with painstaking detail. But deity has gone out of life. The
Powers symbolised are no longer experienced."
"These Powers, you suggest, then--their Kas, as it were--may still--"
But she waved aside the interruption. "They are satisfied, as the common
people were, with a degraded literalism," she went on. "Nut was the
Heavens, who spread herself across the earth in the form of a woman;
Shu, the vastness of space; the ibis typified Thoth, and Hathor was the
Patron of the Western Hills; Khonsu, the moon, was personified, as was
the deity of the Nile. But the high priest of Ra, the sun, you notice,
remained ever the Great One of Visions."
The High Priest, the Great One of Visions!--How wonderfully again she
made the sentence sing. She put splendour into it. The pictures shifted
suddenly closer in his mind. He saw the grandeur of Memphis and
Heliopolis rise against the stars and shake the sand of ages from their
stern old temples.
"You think it possible, then, to get into touch with these High Powers
you speak of, Powers once manifested in common forms?"
Henriot asked the question with a degree of conviction and solemnity
that surprised himself. The scenery changed about him as he listened.
The spacious halls of this former khedivial Palace melted into Desert
spaces. He smelt the open wilderness, the sand that haunted Helouan. The
soft-footed Arab servants moved across the hall in their white sheets
like eddies of dust the wind stirred from the Libyan dunes. And over
these two strangers close beside him stole a queer, indefinite
alteration. Moods and emotions, nameless as unknown stars, rose through
his soul, trailing dark mists of memory from unfathomable distances.
Lady Statham answered him indirectly. He found himself wishing that
those steady eyes would sometimes close.
"Love is known only by feeling it," she said, her voice deepening a
little. "Behind the form you feel the person loved. The process is an
evocation, pure and simple. An arduous ceremonial, involving worship and
devotional preparation, is the means. It is a difficult ritual--the
only one acknowledged by the world as still effectual. Ritual is the
passage way of the soul into the Infinite."
He might have said the words himself. The thought lay in him while she
uttered it. Evocation everywhere in life was as true as assimilation.
Nevertheless, he stared his companion full in the eyes with a touch of
almost rude amazement. But no further questions prompted themselves; or,
rather, he declined to ask them. He recalled, somehow uneasily, that in
ceremonial the points of the compass have significance, standing for
forces and activities that sleep there until invoked, and a passing
light fell upon that curious midnight request in the corridor upstairs.
These two were on the track of undesirable experiments, he thought....
They wished to include him too.
"You go at night sometimes into the Desert?" he heard himself saying. It
was impulsive and miscalculated. His feeling that it would be wise to
change the conversation resulted in giving it fresh impetus instead.
"We saw you there--in the Wadi Hof," put in Vance, suddenly breaking his
long silence; "you too sleep out, then? It means, you know, the Valley
of Fear."
"We wondered--" It was Lady Statham's voice, and she leaned forward
eagerly as she said it, then abruptly left the sentence incomplete.
Henriot started; a sense of momentary acute discomfort again ran over
him. The same second she continued, though obviously changing the
phrase--"we wondered how you spent your day there, during the heat. But
you paint, don't you? You draw, I mean?"
The commonplace question, he realised in every fibre of his being, meant
something _they_ deemed significant. Was it his talent for drawing that
they sought to use him for? Even as he answered with a simple
affirmative, he had a flash of intuition that might be fanciful, yet
that might be true: that this extraordinary pair were intent upon some
ceremony of evocation that should summon into actual physical expression
some Power--some type of life--known long ago to ancient worship, and
that they even sought to fix its bodily outline with the pencil--his
pencil.
A gateway of incredible adventure opened at his feet. He balanced on the
edge of knowing unutterable things. Here was a clue that might lead him
towards the hidden Egypt he had ever craved to know. An awful hand was
beckoning. The sands were shifting. He saw the million eyes of the
Desert watching him from beneath the level lids of centuries. Speck by
speck, and grain by grain, the sand that smothered memory lifted the
countless wrappings that embalmed it.
And he was willing, yet afraid. Why in the world did he hesitate and
shrink? Why was it that the presence of this silent, watching
personality in the chair beside him kept caution still alive, with
warning close behind? The pictures in his mind were gorgeously coloured.
It was Richard Vance who somehow streaked them through with black. A
thing of darkness, born of this man's unassertive presence, flitted ever
across the scenery, marring its grandeur with something evil, petty,
dreadful. He held a horrible thought alive. His mind was thinking venal
purposes.
In Henriot himself imagination had grown curiously heated, fed by what
had been suggested rather than actually said. Ideas of immensity crowded
his brain, yet never assumed definite shape. They were familiar, even as
this strange woman was familiar. Once, long ago, he had known them well;
had even practised them beneath these bright Egyptian stars. Whence came
this prodigious glad excitement in his heart, this sense of mighty
Powers coaxed down to influence the very details of daily life? Behind
them, for all their vagueness, lay an archetypal splendour, fraught with
forgotten meanings. He had always been aware of it in this mysterious
land, but it had ever hitherto eluded him. It hovered everywhere. He had
felt it brooding behind the towering Colossi at Thebes, in the skeletons
of wasted temples, in the uncouth comeliness of the Sphinx, and in the
crude terror of the Pyramids even. Over the whole of Egypt hung its
invisible wings. These were but isolated fragments of the Body that
might express it. And the Desert remained its cleanest, truest symbol.
Sand knew it closest. Sand might even give it bodily form and outline.
But, while it escaped description in his mind, as equally it eluded
visualisation in his soul, he felt that it combined with its vastness
something infinitely small as well. Of such wee particles is the giant
Desert born....
Henriot started nervously in his chair, convicted once more of
unconscionable staring; and at the same moment a group of hotel people,
returning from a dance, passed through the hall and nodded him
good-night. The scent of the women reached him; and with it the sound of
their voices discussing personalities just left behind. A London
atmosphere came with them. He caught trivial phrases, uttered in a
drawling tone, and followed by the shrill laughter of a girl. They
passed upstairs, discussing their little things, like marionettes upon a
tiny stage.
But their passage brought him back to things of modern life, and to some
standard of familiar measurement. The pictures that his soul had gazed
at so deep within, he realised, were a pictorial transfer caught
incompletely from this woman's vivid mind. He had seen the Desert as the
grey, enormous Tomb where hovered still the Ka of ancient Egypt. Sand
screened her visage with the veil of centuries. But She was there, and
She was living. Egypt herself had pitched a temporary camp in him, and
then moved on.
There was a momentary break, a sense of abruptness and dislocation. And
then he became aware that Lady Statham had been speaking for some time
before he caught her actual words, and that a certain change had come
into her voice as also into her manner.
V
She was leaning closer to him, her face suddenly glowing and alive.
Through the stone figure coursed the fires of a passion that deepened
the coal-black eyes and communicated a hint of light--of exaltation--to
her whole person. It was incredibly moving. To this deep passion was due
the power he had felt. It was her entire life; she lived for it, she
would die for it. Her calmness of manner enhanced its effect. Hence the
strength of those first impressions that had stormed him. The woman had
belief; however wild and strange, it was sacred to her. The secret of
her influence was--conviction.
His attitude shifted several points then. The wonder in him passed over
into awe. The things she knew were real. They were not merely
imaginative speculations.
"I knew I was not wrong in thinking you in sympathy with this line of
thought," she was saying in lower voice, steady with earnestness, and as
though she had read his mind. "You, too, know, though perhaps you hardly
realise that you know. It lies so deep in you that you only get vague
feelings of it--intimations of memory. Isn't that the case?"
Henriot gave assent with his eyes; it was the truth.
"What we know instinctively," she continued, "is simply what we are
trying to remember. Knowledge is memory." She paused a moment watching
his face closely. "At least, you are free from that cheap scepticism
which labels these old beliefs as superstition." It was not even a
question.
"I--worship real belief--of any kind," he stammered, for her words and
the close proximity of her atmosphere caused a strange upheaval in his
heart that he could not account for. He faltered in his speech. "It is
the most vital quality in life--rarer than deity." He was using her own
phrases even. "It is creative. It constructs the world anew--"
"And may reconstruct the old."
She said it, lifting her face above him a little, so that her eyes
looked down into his own. It grew big and somehow masculine. It was the
face of a priest, spiritual power in it. Where, oh where in the echoing
Past had he known this woman's soul? He saw her in another setting, a
forest of columns dim about her, towering above giant aisles. Again he
felt the Desert had come close. Into this tent-like hall of the hotel
came the sifting of tiny sand. It heaped softly about the very furniture
against his feet, blocking the exits of door and window. It shrouded the
little present. The wind that brought it stirred a veil that had hung
for ages motionless....
She had been saying many things that he had missed while his mind went
searching. "There were types of life the Atlantean system knew it might
revive--life unmanifested to-day in any bodily form," was the sentence
he caught with his return to the actual present.
"A type of life?" he whispered, looking about him, as though to see who
it was had joined them; "you mean a--soul? Some kind of soul, alien to
humanity, or to--to any forms of living thing in the world to-day?" What
she had been saying reached him somehow, it seemed, though he had not
heard the words themselves. Still hesitating, he was yet so eager to
hear. Already he felt she meant to include him in her purposes, and that
in the end he must go willingly. So strong was her persuasion on his
mind.
And he felt as if he knew vaguely what was coming. Before she answered
his curious question--prompting it indeed--rose in his mind that strange
idea of the Group-Soul: the theory that big souls cannot express
themselves in a single individual, but need an entire group for their
full manifestation.
He listened intently. The reflection that this sudden intimacy was
unnatural, he rejected, for many conversations were really gathered
into one. Long watching and preparation on both sides had cleared the
way for the ripening of acquaintance into confidence--how long he dimly
wondered? But if this conception of the Group-Soul was not new, the
suggestion Lady Statham developed out of it was both new and
startling--and yet always so curiously familiar. Its value for him lay,
not in far-fetched evidence that supported it, but in the deep belief
which made it a vital asset in an honest inner life.
"An individual," she said quietly, "one soul expressed completely in a
single person, I mean, is exceedingly rare. Not often is a physical
instrument found perfect enough to provide it with adequate expression.
In the lower ranges of humanity--certainly in animal and insect
life--one soul is shared by many. Behind a tribe of savages stands one
Savage. A flock of birds is a single Bird, scattered through the
consciousness of all. They wheel in mid-air, they migrate, they obey the
deep intelligence called instinct--all as one. The life of any one lion
is the life of all--the lion group-soul that manifests itself in the
entire genus. An ant-heap is a single Ant; through the bees spreads the
consciousness of a single Bee."
Henriot knew what she was working up to. In his eagerness to hasten
disclosure he interrupted--
"And there may be types of life that have no corresponding bodily
expression at all, then?" he asked as though the question were forced
out of him. "They exist as Powers--unmanifested on the earth to-day?"
"Powers," she answered, watching him closely with unswerving stare,
"that need a group to provide their body--their physical expression--if
they came back."
"Came back!" he repeated below his breath.
But she heard him. "They once had expression. Egypt, Atlantis knew
them--spiritual Powers that never visit the world to-day."
"Bodies," he whispered softly, "actual bodies?"
"Their sphere of action, you see, would be their body. And it might be
physical outline. So potent a descent of spiritual life would select
materials for its body where it could find them. Our conventional notion
of a body--what is it? A single outline moving altogether in one
direction. For little human souls, or fragments, this is sufficient. But
for vaster types of soul an entire host would be required."
"A church?" he ventured. "Some Body of belief, you surely mean?"
She bowed her head a moment in assent. She was determined he should
seize her meaning fully.
"A wave of spiritual awakening--a descent of spiritual life upon a
nation," she answered slowly, "forms itself a church, and the body of
true believers are its sphere of action. They are literally its bodily
expression. Each individual believer is a corpuscle in that Body. The
Power has provided itself with a vehicle of manifestation. Otherwise we
could not know it. And the more real the belief of each individual, the
more perfect the expression of the spiritual life behind them all. A
Group-soul walks the earth. Moreover, a nation naturally devout could
attract a type of soul unknown to a nation that denies all faith. Faith
brings back the gods.... But to-day belief is dead, and Deity has left
the world."
She talked on and on, developing this main idea that in days of older
faiths there were deific types of life upon the earth, evoked by worship
and beneficial to humanity. They had long ago withdrawn because the
worship which brought them down had died the death. The world had grown
pettier. These vast centres of Spiritual Power found no "Body" in which
they now could express themselves or manifest.... Her thoughts and
phrases poured over him like sand. It was always sand he felt--burying
the Present and uncovering the Past....
He tried to steady his mind upon familiar objects, but wherever he
looked Sand stared him in the face. Outside these trivial walls the
Desert lay listening. It lay waiting too. Vance himself had dropped out
of recognition. He belonged to the world of things to-day. But this
woman and himself stood thousands of years away, beneath the columns of
a Temple in the sands. And the sands were moving. His feet went shifting
with them ... running down vistas of ageless memory that woke terror by
their sheer immensity of distance....
Like a muffled voice that called to him through many veils and
wrappings, he heard her describe the stupendous Powers that evocation
might coax down again among the world of men.
"To what useful end?" he asked at length, amazed at his own temerity,
and because he knew instinctively the answer in advance. It rose through
these layers of coiling memory in his soul.
"The extension of spiritual knowledge and the widening of life," she
answered. "The link with the 'unearthly kingdom' wherein this ancient
system went forever searching, would be re-established. Complete
rehabilitation might follow. Portions--little portions of these
Powers--expressed themselves naturally once in certain animal types,
instinctive life that did not deny or reject them. The worship of sacred
animals was the relic of a once gigantic system of evocation--not of
monsters," and she smiled sadly, "but of Powers that were willing and
ready to descend when worship summoned them."
Again, beneath his breath, Henriot heard himself murmur--his own voice
startled him as he whispered it: "Actual bodily shape and outline?"
"Material for bodies is everywhere," she answered, equally low; "dust to
which we all return; sand, if you prefer it, fine, fine sand. Life
moulds it easily enough, when that life is potent."
A certain confusion spread slowly through his mind as he heard her. He
lit a cigarette and smoked some minutes in silence. Lady Statham and her
nephew waited for him to speak. At length, after some inner battling and
hesitation, he put the question that he knew they waited for. It was
impossible to resist any longer.
"It would be interesting to know the method," he said, "and to revive,
perhaps, by experiment--"
Before he could complete his thought, she took him up:
"There are some who claim to know it," she said gravely--her eyes a
moment masterful. "A clue, thus followed, might lead to the entire
reconstruction I spoke of."
"And the method?" he repeated faintly.
"Evoke the Power by ceremonial evocation--the ritual is obtainable--and
note the form it assumes. Then establish it. This shape or outline once
secured, could then be made permanent--a mould for its return at
will--its natural physical expression here on earth."
"Idol!" he exclaimed.
"Image," she replied at once. "Life, before we can know it, must have a
body. Our souls, in order to manifest here, need a material vehicle."
"And--to obtain this form or outline?" he began; "to fix it, rather?"
"Would be required the clever pencil of a fearless looker-on--some one
not engaged in the actual evocation. This form, accurately made
permanent in solid matter, say in stone, would provide a channel always
open. Experiment, properly speaking, might then begin. The cisterns of
Power behind would be accessible."
"An amazing proposition!" Henriot exclaimed. What surprised him was that
he felt no desire to laugh, and little even to doubt.
"Yet known to every religion that ever deserved the name," put in Vance
like a voice from a distance. Blackness came somehow with his
interruption--a touch of darkness. He spoke eagerly.
To all the talk that followed, and there was much of it, Henriot
listened with but half an ear. This one idea stormed through him with an
uproar that killed attention. Judgment was held utterly in abeyance. He
carried away from it some vague suggestion that this woman had hinted at
previous lives she half remembered, and that every year she came to
Egypt, haunting the sands and temples in the effort to recover lost
clues. And he recalled afterwards that she said, "This all came to me as
a child, just as though it was something half remembered." There was the
further suggestion that he himself was not unknown to her; that they,
too, had met before. But this, compared to the grave certainty of the
rest, was merest fantasy that did not hold his attention. He answered,
hardly knowing what he said. His preoccupation with other thoughts deep
down was so intense, that he was probably barely polite, uttering empty
phrases, with his mind elsewhere. His one desire was to escape and be
alone, and it was with genuine relief that he presently excused himself
and went upstairs to bed. The halls, he noticed, were empty; an Arab
servant waited to put the lights out. He walked up, for the lift had
long ceased running.
And the magic of old Egypt stalked beside him. The studies that had
fascinated his mind in earlier youth returned with the power that had
subdued his mind in boyhood. The cult of Osiris woke in his blood again;
Horus and Nephthys stirred in their long-forgotten centres. There
revived in him, too long buried, the awful glamour of those liturgal
rites and vast body of observances, those spells and formulae of
incantation of the oldest known recension that years ago had captured
his imagination and belief--the Book of the Dead. Trumpet voices called
to his heart again across the desert of some dim past. There were forms
of life--impulses from the Creative Power which is the Universe--other
than the soul of man. They could be known. A spiritual exaltation,
roused by the words and presence of this singular woman, shouted to him
as he went.
Then, as he closed his bedroom door, carefully locking it, there stood
beside him--Vance. The forgotten figure of Vance came up close--the
watching eyes, the simulated interest, the feigned belief, the detective
mental attitude, these broke through the grandiose panorama, bringing
darkness. Vance, strong personality that hid behind assumed nonentity
for some purpose of his own, intruded with sudden violence, demanding an
explanation of his presence.
And, with an equal suddenness, explanation offered itself then and
there. It came unsought, its horror of certainty utterly unjustified;
and it came in this unexpected fashion:
Behind the interest and acquiescence of the man ran--fear: but behind
the vivid fear ran another thing that Henriot now perceived was vile.
For the first time in his life, Henriot knew it at close quarters,
actual, ready to operate. Though familiar enough in daily life to be of
common occurrence, Henriot had never realised it as he did now, so close
and terrible. In the same way he had never _realised_ that he would
die--vanish from the busy world of men and women, forgotten as though he
had never existed, an eddy of wind-blown dust. And in the man named
Richard Vance this thing was close upon blossom. Henriot could not name
it to himself. Even in thought it appalled him.
* * * * *
He undressed hurriedly, almost with the child's idea of finding safety
between the sheets. His mind undressed itself as well. The business of
the day laid itself automatically aside; the will sank down; desire grew
inactive. Henriot was exhausted. But, in that stage towards slumber when
thinking stops, and only fugitive pictures pass across the mind in
shadowy dance, his brain ceased shouting its mechanical explanations,
and his soul unveiled a peering eye. Great limbs of memory, smothered by
the activities of the Present, stirred their stiffened lengths through
the sands of long ago--sands this woman had begun to excavate from some
far-off pre-existence they had surely known together. Vagueness and
certainty ran hand in hand. Details were unrecoverable, but the emotions
in which they were embedded moved.
He turned restlessly in his bed, striving to seize the amazing clues and
follow them. But deliberate effort hid them instantly again; they
retired instantly into the subconsciousness. With the brain of this body
he now occupied they had nothing to do. The brain stored memories of
each life only. This ancient script was graven in his soul.
Subconsciousness alone could interpret and reveal. And it was his
subconscious memory that Lady Statham had been so busily excavating.
Dimly it stirred and moved about the depths within him, never clearly
seen, indefinite, felt as a yearning after unrecoverable knowledge.
Against the darker background of Vance's fear and sinister purpose--both
of this present life, and recent--he saw the grandeur of this woman's
impossible dream, and _knew_, beyond argument or reason, that it was
true. Judgment and will asleep, he left the impossibility aside, and
took the grandeur. The Belief of Lady Statham was not credulity and
superstition; it was Memory. Still to this day, over the sands of Egypt,
hovered immense spiritual potencies, so vast that they could only know
physical expression in a group--in many. Their sphere of bodily
manifestation must be a host, each individual unit in that host a
corpuscle in the whole.
The wind, rising from the Lybian wastes across the Nile, swept up
against the exposed side of the hotel, and made his windows rattle--the
old, sad winds of Egypt. Henriot got out of bed to fasten the outside
shutters. He stood a moment and watched the moon floating down behind
the Sakkara Pyramids. The Pleiades and Orion's Belt hung brilliantly;
the Great Bear was close to the horizon. In the sky above the Desert
swung ten thousand stars. No sounds rose from the streets of Helouan.
The tide of sand was coming slowly in.
And a flock of enormous thoughts swooped past him from fields of this
unbelievable, lost memory. The Desert, pale in the moon, was coextensive
with the night, too huge for comfort or understanding, yet charged to
the brim with infinite peace. Behind its majesty of silence lay whispers
of a vanished language that once could call with power upon mighty
spiritual Agencies. Its skirts were folded now, but, slowly across the
leagues of sand, they began to stir and rearrange themselves. He grew
suddenly aware of this enveloping shroud of sand--as the raw material of
bodily expression: Form.
The sand was in his imagination and his mind. Shaking loosely the folds
of its gigantic skirts, it rose; it moved a little towards him. He saw
the eternal countenance of the Desert watching him--immobile and
unchanging behind these shifting veils the winds laid so carefully over
it. Egypt, the ancient Egypt, turned in her vast sarcophagus of Desert,
wakening from her sleep of ages at the Belief of approaching
worshippers.
Only in this insignificant manner could he express a letter of the
terrific language that crowded to seek expression through his soul....
He closed the shutters and carefully fastened them. He turned to go back
to bed, curiously trembling. Then, as he did so, the whole singular
delusion caught him with a shock that held him motionless. Up rose the
stupendous apparition of the entire Desert and stood behind him on that
balcony. Swift as thought, in silence, the Desert stood on end against
his very face. It towered across the sky, hiding Orion and the moon; it
dipped below the horizons. The whole grey sheet of it rose up before his
eyes and stood. Through its unfolding skirts ran ten thousand eddies of
swirling sand as the creases of its grave-clothes smoothed themselves
out in moonlight. And a bleak, scarred countenance, huge as a planet,
gazed down into his own....
Through his dreamless sleep that night two things lay active and awake
... in the subconscious part that knows no slumber. They were
incongruous. One was evil, small and human; the other unearthly and
sublime. For the memory of the fear that haunted Vance, and the sinister
cause of it, pricked at him all night long. But behind, beyond this
common, intelligible emotion, lay the crowding wonder that caught his
soul with glory:
The Sand was stirring, the Desert was awake. Ready to mate with them in
material form, brooded close the Ka of that colossal Entity that once
expressed itself through the myriad life of ancient Egypt.