And so he took pains, though without making definite suggestion, to
place himself in the way of this woman and her nephew--only to find that
his hints were disregarded. They left him alone, if they did not
actually avoid him. Moreover, he rarely came across them now. Only at
night, or in the queer dusk hours, he caught glimpses of them moving
hurriedly off from the hotel, and always desertwards. And their
disregard, well calculated, enflamed his desire to the point when he
almost decided to propose himself. Quite suddenly, then, the idea
flashed through him--how do they come, these odd revelations, when the
mind lies receptive like a plate sensitised by anticipation?--that they
were waiting for a certain date, and, with the notion, came Mansfield's
remark about "the Night of Power," believed in by the old Egyptian
Calendar as a time when the supersensuous world moves close against the
minds of men with all its troop of possibilities. And the thought, once
lodged in its corner of imagination, grew strong. He looked it up. Ten
days from now, he found, Leyel-el-Sud would be upon him, with a moon,
too, at the full. And this strange hint of guidance he accepted. In his
present mood, as he admitted, smiling to himself, he could accept
anything. It was part of it, it belonged to the adventure. But, even
while he persuaded himself that it was play, the solemn reality, of
what lay ahead increased amazingly, sketched darkly in his very soul.
These intervening days he spent as best he could--impatiently, a prey to
quite opposite emotions. In the blazing sunshine he thought of it and
laughed; but at night he lay often sleepless, calculating chances of
escape. He never did escape, however. The Desert that watched little
Helouan with great, unwinking eyes watched also every turn and twist he
made. Like this oasis, he basked in the sun of older time, and dreamed
beneath forgotten moons. The sand at last had crept into his inmost
heart. It sifted over him.
Seeking a reaction from normal, everyday things, he made tourist trips;
yet, while recognising the comedy in his attitude, he never could lose
sight of the grandeur that banked it up so hauntingly. These two
contrary emotions grafted themselves on all he did and saw. He crossed
the Nile at Bedrashein, and went again to the Tomb-World of Sakkara; but
through all the chatter of veiled and helmeted tourists, the
_bandar-log_ of our modern Jungle, ran this dark under-stream of awe
their monkey methods could not turn aside. One world lay upon another,
but this modern layer was a shallow crust that, like the phenomenon of
the "desert-film," a mere angle of falling light could instantly
obliterate. Beneath the sand, deep down, he passed along the Street of
Tombs, as he had often passed before, moved then merely by historical
curiosity and admiration, but now by emotions for which he found no
name. He saw the enormous sarcophagi of granite in their gloomy chambers
where the sacred bulls once lay, swathed and embalmed like human beings,
and, in the flickering candle light, the mood of ancient rites surged
round him, menacing his doubts and laughter. The least human whisper in
these subterraneans, dug out first four thousand years ago, revived
ominous Powers that stalked beside him, forbidding and premonitive. He
gazed at the spots where Mariette, unearthing them forty years ago,
found fresh as of yesterday the marks of fingers and naked feet--of
those who set the sixty-five ton slabs in position. And when he came up
again into the sunshine he met the eternal questions of the pyramids,
overtopping all his mental horizons. Sand blocked all the avenues of
younger emotion, leaving the channels of something in him incalculably
older, open and clean swept.
He slipped homewards, uncomfortable and followed, glad to be with a
crowd--because he was otherwise alone with more than he could dare to
think about. Keeping just ahead of his companions, he crossed the desert
edge where the ghost of Memphis walks under rustling palm trees that
screen no stone left upon another of all its mile-long populous
splendours. For here was a vista his imagination could realise; here he
could know the comfort of solid ground his feet could touch. Gigantic
Ramases, lying on his back beneath their shade and staring at the sky,
similarly helped to steady his swaying thoughts. Imagination could deal
with these.
And daily thus he watched the busy world go to and fro to its scale of
tips and bargaining, and gladly mingled with it, trying to laugh and
study guidebooks, and listen to half-fledged explanations, but always
seeing the comedy of his poor attempts. Not all those little donkeys,
bells tinkling, beads shining, trotting beneath their comical burdens to
the tune of shouting and belabouring, could stem this tide of deeper
things the woman had let loose in the subconscious part of him.
Everywhere he saw the mysterious camels go slouching through the sand,
gurgling the water in their skinny, extended throats. Centuries passed
between the enormous knee-stroke of their stride. And, every night, the
sunsets restored the forbidding, graver mood, with their crimson, golden
splendour, their strange green shafts of light, then--sudden twilight
that brought the Past upon him with an awful leap. Upon the stage then
stepped the figures of this pair of human beings, chanting their ancient
plainsong of incantation in the moonlit desert, and working their rites
of unholy evocation as the priests had worked them centuries before in
the sands that now buried Sakkara fathoms deep.
Then one morning he woke with a question in his mind, as though it had
been asked of him in sleep and he had waked just before the answer came.
"Why do I spend my time sight-seeing, instead of going alone into the
Desert as before? What has made me change?"
This latest mood now asked for explanation. And the answer, coming up
automatically, startled him. It was so clear and sure--had been lying in
the background all along. One word contained it:
Vance.
The sinister intentions of this man, forgotten in the rush of other
emotions, asserted themselves again convincingly. The human horror, so
easily comprehensible, had been smothered for the time by the hint of
unearthly revelations. But it had operated all the time. Now it took
the lead. He dreaded to be alone in the Desert with this dark picture in
his mind of what Vance meant to bring there to completion. This
abomination of a selfish human will returned to fix its terror in him.
To be alone in the Desert meant to be alone with the imaginative picture
of what Vance--he knew it with such strange certainty--hoped to bring
about there.
There was absolutely no evidence to justify the grim suspicion. It
seemed indeed far-fetched enough, this connection between the sand and
the purpose of an evil-minded, violent man. But Henriot saw it true. He
could argue it away in a few minutes--easily. Yet the instant thought
ceased, it returned, led up by intuition. It possessed him, filled his
mind with horrible possibilities. He feared the Desert as he might have
feared the scene of some atrocious crime. And, for the time, this dread
of a merely human thing corrected the big seduction of the other--the
suggested "super-natural."
Side by side with it, his desire to join himself to the purposes of the
woman increased steadily. They kept out of his way apparently; the offer
seemed withdrawn; he grew restless, unable to settle to anything for
long, and once he asked the porter casually if they were leaving the
hotel. Lady Statham had been invisible for days, and Vance was somehow
never within speaking distance. He heard with relief that they had not
gone--but with dread as well. Keen excitement worked in him underground.
He slept badly. Like a schoolboy, he waited for the summons to an
important examination that involved portentous issues, and contradictory
emotions disturbed his peace of mind abominably.