IX

An hour before sunset Henriot put his rugs and food upon a donkey, and

gave the boy directions where to meet him--a considerable distance from

the appointed spot. He went himself on foot. He slipped in the heat

along the sandy street, where strings of camels still go slouching,

shuffling with their loads from the quarries that built the pyramids,

and he felt that little friendly Helouan tried to keep him back. But

desire now was far too strong for caution. The desert tide was rising.

It easily swept him down the long white street towards the enormous

deeps beyond. He felt the pull of a thousand miles before him; and twice

a thousand years drove at his back.

Everything still basked in the sunshine. He passed Al Hayat, the stately

hotel that dominates the village like a palace built against the sky;

and in its pillared colonnades and terraces he saw the throngs of people

having late afternoon tea and listening to the music of a regimental

band. Men in flannels were playing tennis, parties were climbing off

donkeys after long excursions; there was laughter, talking, a babel of

many voices. The gaiety called to him; the everyday spirit whispered to

stay and join the crowd of lively human beings. Soon there would be

merry dinner-parties, dancing, voices of pretty women, sweet white

dresses, singing, and the rest. Soft eyes would question and turn dark.

He picked out several girls he knew among the palms. But it was all

many, oh so many leagues away; centuries lay between him and this modern

world. An indescriable loneliness was in his heart. He went searching

through the sands of forgotten ages, and wandering among the ruins of a

vanished time. He hurried. Already the deeper water caught his breath.

He climbed the steep rise towards the plateau where the Observatory

stands, and saw two of the officials whom he knew taking a siesta after

their long day's work. He felt that his mind, too, had dived and

searched among the heavenly bodies that live in silent, changeless peace

remote from the world of men. They recognised him, these two whose eyes

also knew tremendous distance close. They beckoned, waving the straws

through which they sipped their drinks from tall glasses. Their voices

floated down to him as from the star-fields. He saw the sun gleam upon

the glasses, and heard the clink of the ice against the sides. The

stillness was amazing. He waved an answer, and passed quickly on. He

could not stop this sliding current of the years.

The tide moved faster, the draw of piled-up cycles urging it. He emerged

upon the plateau, and met the cooler Desert air. His feet went crunching

on the "desert-film" that spread its curious dark shiny carpet as far as

the eye could reach; it lay everywhere, unswept and smooth as when the

feet of vanished civilizations trod its burning surface, then dipped

behind the curtains Time pins against the stars. And here the body of

the tide set all one way. There was a greater strength of current,

draught and suction. He felt the powerful undertow. Deeper masses drew

his feet sideways, and he felt the rushing of the central body of the

sand. The sands were moving, from their foundation upwards. He went

unresistingly with them.

Turning a moment, he looked back at shining little Helouan in the blaze

of evening light. The voices reached him very faintly, merged now in a

general murmur. Beyond lay the strip of Delta vivid green, the palms,

the roofs of Bedrashein, the blue laughter of the Nile with its flocks

of curved felucca sails. Further still, rising above the yellow Libyan

horizon, gloomed the vast triangles of a dozen Pyramids, cutting their

wedge-shaped clefts out of a sky fast crimsoning through a sea of gold.

Seen thus, their dignity imposed upon the entire landscape. They towered

darkly, symbolic signatures of the ancient Powers that now watched him

taking these little steps across their damaged territory.

He gazed a minute, then went on. He saw the big pale face of the moon in

the east. Above the ever-silent Thing these giant symbols once

interpreted, she rose, grand, effortless, half-terrible as themselves.

And, with her, she lifted up this tide of the Desert that drew his feet

across the sand to Wadi Hof. A moment later he dipped below the ridge

that buried Helouan and Nile and Pyramids from sight. He entered the

ancient waters. Time then, in an instant, flowed back behind his

footsteps, obliterating every trace. And with it his mind went too. He

stepped across the gulf of centuries, moving into the Past. The Desert

lay before him--an open tomb wherein his soul should read presently of

things long vanished.

The strange half-lights of sunset began to play their witchery then upon

the landscape. A purple glow came down upon the Mokattam Hills.

Perspective danced its tricks of false, incredible deception. The

soaring kites that were a mile away seemed suddenly close, passing in a

moment from the size of gnats to birds with a fabulous stretch of wing.

Ridges and cliffs rushed close without a hint of warning, and level

places sank into declivities and basins that made him trip and stumble.

That indescribable quality of the Desert, which makes timid souls avoid

the hour of dusk, emerged; it spread everywhere, undisguised. And the

bewilderment it brings is no vain, imagined thing, for it distorts

vision utterly, and the effect upon the mind when familiar sight goes

floundering is the simplest way in the world of dragging the anchor that

grips reality. At the hour of sunset this bewilderment comes upon a man

with a disconcerting swiftness. It rose now with all this weird

rapidity. Henriot found himself enveloped at a moment's notice.

But, knowing well its effect, he tried to judge it and pass on. The

other matters, the object of his journey chief of all, he refused to

dwell upon with any imagination. Wisely, his mind, while never losing

sight of it, declined to admit the exaggeration that over-elaborate

thinking brings. "I'm going to witness an incredible experiment in which

two enthusiastic religious dreamers believe firmly," he repeated to

himself. "I have agreed to draw--anything I see. There may be truth in

it, or they may be merely self-suggested vision due to an artificial

exaltation of their minds. I'm interested--perhaps against my better

judgment. Yet I'll see the adventure out--because I _must_."

This was the attitude he told himself to take. Whether it was the real

one, or merely adopted to warm a cooling courage, he could not tell. The

emotions were so complex and warring. His mind, automatically, kept

repeating this comforting formula. Deeper than that he could not see to

judge. For a man who knew the full content of his thought at such a time

would solve some of the oldest psychological problems in the world. Sand

had already buried judgment, and with it all attempt to explain the

adventure by the standards acceptable to his brain of to-day. He steered

subconsciously through a world of dim, huge, half-remembered wonders.

The sun, with that abrupt Egyptian suddenness, was below the horizon

now. The pyramid field had swallowed it. Ra, in his golden boat, sailed

distant seas beyond the Libyan wilderness. Henriot walked on and on,

aware of utter loneliness. He was walking fields of dream, too remote

from modern life to recall companionship he once had surely known. How

dim it was, how deep and distant, how lost in this sea of an

incalculable Past! He walked into the places that are soundless. The

soundlessness of ocean, miles below the surface, was about him. He was

with One only--this unfathomable, silent thing where nothing breathes or

stirs--nothing but sunshine, shadow and the wind-borne sand. Slowly, in

front, the moon climbed up the eastern sky, hanging above the

silence--silence that ran unbroken across the horizons to where Suez

gleamed upon the waters of a sister sea in motion. That moon was

glinting now upon the Arabian Mountains by its desolate shores.

Southwards stretched the wastes of Upper Egypt a thousand miles to meet

the Nubian wilderness. But over all these separate Deserts stirred the

soft whisper of the moving sand--deep murmuring message that Life was on

the way to unwind Death. The Ka of Egypt, swathed in centuries of sand,

hovered beneath the moon towards her ancient tenement.

For the transformation of the Desert now began in earnest. It grew

apace. Before he had gone the first two miles of his hour's journey, the

twilight caught the rocky hills and twisted them into those monstrous

revelations of physiognomies they barely take the trouble to conceal

even in the daytime. And, while he well understood the eroding agencies

that have produced them, there yet rose in his mind a deeper

interpretation lurking just behind their literal meanings. Here, through

the motionless surfaces, that nameless thing the Desert ill conceals

urged outwards into embryonic form and shape, akin, he almost felt, to

those immense deific symbols of Other Life the Egyptians knew and

worshipped. Hence, from the Desert, had first come, he felt, the

unearthly life they typified in their monstrous figures of granite,

evoked in their stately temples, and communed with in the ritual of

their Mystery ceremonials.

This "watching" aspect of the Libyan Desert is really natural enough;

but it is just the natural, Henriot knew, that brings the deepest

revelations. The surface limestones, resisting the erosion, block

themselves ominously against the sky, while the softer sand beneath sets

them on altared pedestals that define their isolation splendidly. Blunt

and unconquerable, these masses now watched him pass between them. The

Desert surface formed them, gave them birth. They rose, they saw, they

sank down again--waves upon a sea that carried forgotten life up from

the depths below. Of forbidding, even menacing type, they somewhere

mated with genuine grandeur. Unformed, according to any standard of

human or of animal faces, they achieved an air of giant physiognomy

which made them terrible. The unwinking stare of eyes--lidless eyes that

yet ever succeed in hiding--looked out under well-marked, level

eyebrows, suggesting a vision that included the motives and purposes of

his very heart. They looked up grandly, understood why he was there, and

then--slowly withdrew their mysterious, penetrating gaze.

The strata built them so marvellously up; the heavy, threatening brows;

thick lips, curved by the ages into a semblance of cold smiles; jowls

drooping into sandy heaps that climbed against the cheeks; protruding

jaws, and the suggestion of shoulders just about to lift the entire

bodies out of the sandy beds--this host of countenances conveyed a

solemnity of expression that seemed everlasting, implacable as Death. Of

human signature they bore no trace, nor was comparison possible between

their kind and any animal life. They peopled the Desert here. And their

smiles, concealed yet just discernible, went broadening with the

darkness into a Desert laughter. The silence bore it underground. But

Henriot was aware of it. The troop of faces slipped into that single,

enormous countenance which is the visage of the Sand. And he saw it

everywhere, yet nowhere.

Thus with the darkness grew his imaginative interpretation of the

Desert. Yet there was construction in it, a construction, moreover, that

was _not_ entirely his own. Powers, he felt, were rising, stirring,

wakening from sleep. Behind the natural faces that he saw, these other

things peered gravely at him as he passed. They used, as it were,

materials that lay ready to their hand. Imagination furnished these

hints of outline, yet the Powers themselves were real. There _was_ this

amazing movement of the sand. By no other manner could his mind have

conceived of such a thing, nor dreamed of this simple, yet dreadful

method of approach.

Approach! that was the word that first stood out and startled him. There

was approach; something was drawing nearer. The Desert rose and walked

beside him. For not alone these ribs of gleaming limestone contributed

towards the elemental visages, but the entire hills, of which they were

an outcrop, ran to assist in the formation, and were a necessary part of

them. He was watched and stared at from behind, in front, on either

side, and even from below. The sand that swept him on, kept even pace

with him. It turned luminous too, with a patchwork of glimmering effect

that was indescribably weird; lanterns glowed within its substance, and

by their light he stumbled on, glad of the Arab boy he would presently

meet at the appointed place.

The last torch of the sunset had flickered out, melting into the

wilderness, when, suddenly opening at his feet, gaped the deep, wide

gully known as Wadi Hof. Its curve swept past him.

This first impression came upon him with a certain violence: that the

desolate valley rushed. He saw but a section of its curve and sweep, but

through its entire length of several miles the Wadi fled away. The moon

whitened it like snow, piling black shadows very close against the

cliffs. In the flood of moonlight it went rushing past. It was emptying

itself.

For a moment the stream of movement seemed to pause and look up into his

face, then instantly went on again upon its swift career. It was like

the procession of a river to the sea. The valley emptied itself to make

way for what was coming. The approach, moreover, had already begun.

Conscious that he was trembling, he stood and gazed into the depths,

seeking to steady his mind by the repetition of the little formula he

had used before. He said it half aloud. But, while he did so, his heart

whispered quite other things. Thoughts the woman and the man had sown

rose up in a flock and fell upon him like a storm of sand. Their impetus

drove off all support of ordinary ideas. They shook him where he stood,

staring down into this river of strange invisible movement that was

hundreds of feet in depth and a quarter of a mile across.

He sought to realise himself as he actually was to-day--mere visitor to

Helouan, tempted into this wild adventure with two strangers. But in

vain. That seemed a dream, unreal, a transient detail picked out from

the enormous Past that now engulfed him, heart and mind and soul. _This_

was the reality.

The shapes and faces that the hills of sand built round him were the

play of excited fancy only. By sheer force he pinned his thought against

this fact: but further he could not get. There _were_ Powers at work;

they were being stirred, wakened somewhere into activity. Evocation had

already begun. That sense of their approach as he had walked along from

Helouan was not imaginary. A descent of some type of life, vanished from

the world too long for recollection, was on the way,--so vast that it

would manifest itself in a group of forms, a troop, a host, an army.

These two were near him somewhere at this very moment, already long at

work, their minds driving beyond this little world. The valley was

emptying itself--for the descent of life their ritual invited.

And the movement in the sand was likewise true. He recalled the

sentences the woman had used. "My body," he reflected, "like the bodies

life makes use of everywhere, is mere upright heap of earth and dust

and--sand. Here in the Desert is the raw material, the greatest store of

it in the world."

And on the heels of it came sharply that other thing: that this

descending Life would press into its service all loose matter within its

reach--to form that sphere of action which would be in a literal sense

its Body.

In the first few seconds, as he stood there, he realised all this, and

realised it with an overwhelming conviction it was futile to deny. The

fast-emptying valley would later brim with an unaccustomed and terrific

life. Yet Death hid there too--a little, ugly, insignificant death. With

the name of Vance it flashed upon his mind and vanished, too tiny to be

thought about in this torrent of grander messages that shook the depths

within his soul. He bowed his head a moment, hardly knowing what he did.

He could have waited thus a thousand years it seemed. He was conscious

of a wild desire to run away, to hide, to efface himself utterly, his

terror, his curiosity, his little wonder, and not be seen of anything.

But it was all vain and foolish. The Desert saw him. The Gigantic knew

that he was there. No escape was possible any longer. Caught by the

sand, he stood amid eternal things. The river of movement swept him too.

These hills, now motionless as statues, would presently glide forward

into the cavalcade, sway like vessels, and go past with the procession.

At present only the contents, not the frame, of the Wadi moved. An

immense soft brush of moonlight swept it empty for what was on the

way.... But presently the entire Desert would stand up and also go.

Then, making a sideways movement, his feet kicked against something soft

and yielding that lay heaped upon the Desert floor, and Henriot

discovered the rugs the Arab boy had carefully set down before he made

full speed for the friendly lights of Helouan. The sound of his

departing footsteps had long since died away. He was alone.

The detail restored to him his consciousness of the immediate present,

and, stooping, he gathered up the rugs and overcoat and began to make

preparations for the night. But the appointed spot, whence he was to

watch, lay upon the summit of the opposite cliffs. He must cross the

Wadi bed and climb. Slowly and with labour he made his way down a steep

cleft into the depth of the Wadi Hof, sliding and stumbling often, till

at length he stood upon the floor of shining moonlight. It was very

smooth; windless utterly; still as space; each particle of sand lay in

its ancient place asleep. The movement, it seemed, had ceased.

He clambered next up the eastern side, through pitch-black shadows, and

within the hour reached the ledge upon the top whence he could see below

him, like a silvered map, the sweep of the valley bed. The wind nipped

keenly here again, coming over the leagues of cooling sand. Loose

boulders of splintered rock, started by his climbing, crashed and boomed

into the depths. He banked the rugs behind him, wrapped himself in his

overcoat, and lay down to wait. Behind him was a two-foot crumbling wall

against which he leaned; in front a drop of several hundred feet through

space. He lay upon a platform, therefore, invisible from the Desert at

his back. Below, the curving Wadi formed a natural amphitheatre in which

each separate boulder fallen from the cliffs, and even the little

_silla_ shrubs the camels eat, were plainly visible. He noted all the

bigger ones among them. He counted them over half aloud.

And the moving stream he had been unaware of when crossing the bed

itself, now began again. The Wadi went rushing past before the broom of

moonlight. Again, the enormous and the tiny combined in one single

strange impression. For, through this conception of great movement,

stirred also a roving, delicate touch that his imagination felt as

bird-like. Behind the solid mass of the Desert's immobility flashed

something swift and light and airy. Bizarre pictures interpreted it to

him, like rapid snap-shots of a huge flying panorama: he thought of

darting dragon-flies seen at Helouan, of children's little dancing feet,

of twinkling butterflies--of birds. Chiefly, yes, of a flock of birds in

flight, whose separate units formed a single entity. The idea of the

Group-Soul possessed his mind once more. But it came with a sense of

more than curiosity or wonder. Veneration lay behind it, a veneration

touched with awe. It rose in his deepest thought that here was the first

hint of a symbolical representation. A symbol, sacred and inviolable,

belonging to some ancient worship that he half remembered in his soul,

stirred towards interpretation through all his being.

He lay there waiting, wondering vaguely where his two companions were,

yet fear all vanished because he felt attuned to a scale of things too

big to mate with definite dread. There was high anticipation in him, but

not anxiety. Of himself, as Felix Henriot, indeed, he hardly seemed

aware. He was some one else. Or, rather, he was himself at a stage he

had known once far, far away in a remote pre-existence. He watched

himself from dim summits of a Past, of which no further details were as

yet recoverable.

Pencil and sketching-block lay ready to his hand. The moon rose higher,

tucking the shadows ever more closely against the precipices. The silver

passed into a sheet of snowy whiteness, that made every boulder clearly

visible. Solemnity deepened everywhere into awe. The Wadi fled silently

down the stream of hours. It was almost empty now. And then, abruptly,

he was aware of change. The motion altered somewhere. It moved more

quietly; pace slackened; the end of the procession that evacuated the

depth and length of it went trailing past and turned the distant bend.

"It's slowing up," he whispered, as sure of it as though he had watched

a regiment of soldiers filing by. The wind took off his voice like a

flying feather of sound.

And there _was_ a change. It had begun. Night and the moon stood still

to watch and listen. The wind dropped utterly away. The sand ceased its

shifting movement. The Desert everywhere stopped still, and turned.

Some curtain, then, that for centuries had veiled the world, drew

softly up, leaving a shaded vista down which the eyes of his soul peered

towards long-forgotten pictures. Still buried by the sands too deep for

full recovery, he yet perceived dim portions of them--things once

honoured and loved passionately. For once they had surely been to him

the whole of life, not merely a fragment for cheap wonder to inspect.

And they were curiously familiar, even as the person of this woman who

now evoked them was familiar. Henriot made no pretence to more definite

remembrance; but the haunting certainty rushed over him, deeper than

doubt or denial, and with such force that he felt no effort to destroy

it. Some lost sweetness of spiritual ambitions, lived for with this

passionate devotion, and passionately worshipped as men to-day worship

fame and money, revived in him with a tempest of high glory. Centres of

memory stirred from an age-long sleep, so that he could have wept at

their so complete obliteration hitherto. That such majesty had departed

from the world as though it never had existed, was a thought for

desolation and for tears. And though the little fragment he was about to

witness might be crude in itself and incomplete, yet it was part of a

vast system that once explored the richest realms of deity. The

reverence in him contained a holiness of the night and of the stars;

great, gentle awe lay in it too; for he stood, aflame with anticipation

and humility, at the gateway of sacred things.

And this was the mood, no thrill of cheap excitement or alarm to weaken

in, in which he first became aware that two spots of darkness he had

taken all along for boulders on the snowy valley bed, were actually

something very different. They were living figures. They moved. It was

not the shadows slowly following the moonlight, but the stir of human

beings who all these hours had been motionless as stone. He must have

passed them unnoticed within a dozen yards when he crossed the Wadi bed,

and a hundred times from this very ledge his eyes had surely rested on

them without recognition. Their minds, he knew full well, had not been

inactive as their bodies. The important part of the ancient ritual lay,

he remembered, in the powers of the evoking mind.

Here, indeed, was no effective nor theatrical approach of the principal

figures. It had nothing in common with the cheap external ceremonial of

modern days. In forgotten powers of the soul its grandeur lay, potent,

splendid, true. Long before he came, perhaps all through the day, these

two had laboured with their arduous preparations. They were there, part

of the Desert, when hours ago he had crossed the plateau in the

twilight. To them--to this woman's potent working of old ceremonial--had

been due that singular rush of imagination he had felt. He had

interpreted the Desert as alive. Here was the explanation. It _was_

alive. Life was on the way. Long latent, her intense desire summoned it

back to physical expression; and the effect upon him had steadily

increased as he drew nearer to the centre where she would focus its

revival and return. Those singular impressions of being watched and

accompanied were explained. A priest of this old-world worship performed

a genuine evocation; a Great One of Vision revived the cosmic Powers.

Henriot watched the small figures far below him with a sense of dramatic

splendour that only this association of far-off Memory could account

for. It was their rising now, and the lifting of their arms to form a

slow revolving outline, that marked the abrupt cessation of the larger

river of movement; for the sweeping of the Wadi sank into sudden

stillness, and these two, with motions not unlike some dance of

deliberate solemnity, passed slowly through the moonlight to and fro.

His attention fixed upon them both. All other movement ceased. They

fastened the flow of Time against the Desert's body.

What happened then? How could his mind interpret an experience so long

denied that the power of expression, as of comprehension, has ceased to

exist? How translate this symbolical representation, small detail though

it was, of a transcendent worship entombed for most so utterly beyond

recovery? Its splendour could never lodge in minds that conceive Deity

perched upon a cloud within telephoning distance of fashionable

churches. How should he phrase it even to himself, whose memory drew up

pictures from so dim a past that the language fit to frame them lay

unreachable and lost?

Henriot did not know. Perhaps he never yet has known. Certainly, at the

time, he did not even try to think. His sensations remain his

own--untranslatable; and even that instinctive description the mind

gropes for automatically, floundered, halted, and stopped dead. Yet

there rose within him somewhere, from depths long drowned in slumber, a

reviving power by which he saw, divined and recollected--remembered

seemed too literal a word--these elements of a worship he once had

personally known. He, too, had worshipped thus. His soul had moved amid

similar evocations in some aeonian past, whence now the sand was being

cleared away. Symbols of stupendous meaning flashed and went their way

across the lifting mists. He hardly caught their meaning, so long it was

since, he had known them; yet they were familiar as the faces seen in

dreams, and some hint of their spiritual significance left faint traces

in his heart by means of which their grandeur reached towards

interpretation. And all were symbols of a cosmic, deific nature; of

Powers that only symbols can express--prayer-books and sacraments used

in the Wisdom Religion of an older time, but to-day known only in the

decrepit, literal shell which is their degradation.

Grandly the figures moved across the valley bed. The powers of the

heavenly bodies once more joined them. They moved to the measure of a

cosmic dance, whose rhythm was creative. The Universe partnered them.

There was this transfiguration of all common, external things. He

realised that appearances were visible letters of a soundless language,

a language he once had known. The powers of night and moon and desert

sand married with points in the fluid stream of his inmost spiritual

being that knew and welcomed them. He understood.

Old Egypt herself stooped down from her uncovered throne. The stars sent

messengers. There was commotion in the secret, sandy places of the

desert. For the Desert had grown Temple. Columns reared against the sky.

There rose, from leagues away, the chanting of the sand.

The temples, where once this came to pass, were gone, their ruin

questioned by alien hearts that knew not their spiritual meaning. But

here the entire Desert swept in to form a shrine, and the Majesty that

once was Egypt stepped grandly back across ages of denial and neglect.

The sand was altar, and the stars were altar lights. The moon lit up the

vast recesses of the ceiling, and the wind from a thousand miles brought

in the perfume of her incense. For with that faith which shifts

mountains from their sandy bed, two passionate, believing souls invoked

the Ka of Egypt.

And the motions that they made, he saw, were definite harmonious

patterns their dark figures traced upon the shining valley floor. Like

the points of compasses, with stems invisible, and directed from the

sky, their movements marked the outlines of great signatures of

power--the sigils of the type of life they would evoke. It would come as

a Procession. No individual outline could contain it. It needed for its

visible expression--many. The descent of a group-soul, known to the

worship of this mighty system, rose from its lair of centuries and moved

hugely down upon them. The Ka, answering to the summons, would mate with

sand. The Desert was its Body.

Yet it was not this that he had come to fix with block and pencil. Not

yet was the moment when his skill might be of use. He waited, watched,

and listened, while this river of half-remembered things went past him.

The patterns grew beneath his eyes like music. Too intricate and

prolonged to remember with accuracy later, he understood that they were

forms of that root-geometry which lies behind all manifested life. The

mould was being traced in outline. Life would presently inform it. And a

singing rose from the maze of lines whose beauty was like the beauty of

the constellations.

This sound was very faint at first, but grew steadily in volume.

Although no echoes, properly speaking, were possible, these precipices

caught stray notes that trooped in from the further sandy reaches. The

figures certainly were chanting, but their chanting was not all he

heard. Other sounds came to his ears from far away, running past him

through the air from every side, and from incredible distances, all

flocking down into the Wadi bed to join the parent note that summoned

them. The Desert was giving voice. And memory, lifting her hood yet

higher, showed more of her grey, mysterious face that searched his soul

with questions. Had he so soon forgotten that strange union of form and

sound which once was known to the evocative rituals of olden days?

Henriot tried patiently to disentangle this desert-music that their

intoning voices woke, from the humming of the blood in his own veins.

But he succeeded only in part. Sand was already in the air. There was

reverberation, rhythm, measure; there was almost the breaking of the

stream into great syllables. But was it due, this strange reverberation,

to the countless particles of sand meeting in mid-air about him, or--to

larger bodies, whose surfaces caught this friction of the sand and threw

it back against his ears? The wind, now rising, brought particles that

stung his face and hands, and filled his eyes with a minute fine dust

that partially veiled the moonlight. But was not something larger,

vaster these particles composed now also on the way?

Movement and sound and flying sand thus merged themselves more and more

in a single, whirling torrent. But Henriot sought no commonplace

explanation of what he witnessed; and here was the proof that all

happened in some vestibule of inner experience where the strain of

question and answer had no business. One sitting beside him need not

have seen anything at all. His host, for instance, from Helouan, need

not have been aware. Night screened it; Helouan, as the whole of modern

experience, stood in front of the screen. This thing took place behind

it. He crouched motionless, watching in some reconstructed ante-chamber

of the soul's pre-existence, while the torrent grew into a veritable

tempest.

Yet Night remained unshaken; the veil of moonlight did not quiver; the

stars dropped their slender golden pillars unobstructed. Calmness

reigned everywhere as before. The stupendous representation passed on

behind it all.

But the dignity of the little human movements that he watched had become

now indescribable. The gestures of the arms and bodies invested

themselves with consummate grandeur, as these two strode into the

caverns behind manifested life and drew forth symbols that represented

vanished Powers. The sound of their chanting voices broke in cadenced

fragments against the shores of language. The words Henriot never

actually caught, if words they were; yet he understood their

purport--these Names of Power to which the type of returning life gave

answer as they approached. He remembered fumbling for his drawing

materials, with such violence, however, that the pencil snapped in two

between his fingers as he touched it. For now, even here, upon the outer

fringe of the ceremonial ground, there was a stir of forces that set the

very muscles working in him before he had become aware of it....

Then came the moment when his heart leaped against his ribs with a

sudden violence that was almost pain, standing a second later still as

death. The lines upon the valley floor ceased their maze-like dance. All

movement stopped. Sound died away. In the midst of this profound and

dreadful silence the sigils lay empty there below him. They waited to be

in-formed. For the moment of entrance had come at last. Life was close.

And he understood why this return of life had all along suggested a

Procession and could be no mere momentary flash of vision. From such

appalling distance did it sweep down towards the present.

Upon this network, then, of splendid lines, at length held rigid, the

entire Desert reared itself with walls of curtained sand, that dwarfed

the cliffs, the shouldering hills, the very sky. The Desert stood on

end. As once before he had dreamed it from his balcony windows, it rose

upright, towering, and close against his face. It built sudden ramparts

to the stars that chambered the thing he witnessed behind walls no

centuries could ever bring down crumbling into dust.

He himself, in some curious fashion, lay just outside, viewing it apart.

As from a pinnacle, he peered within--peered down with straining eyes

into the vast picture-gallery Memory threw abruptly open. And the

picture spaced its noble outline thus against the very stars. He gazed

between columns, that supported the sky itself, like pillars of sand

that swept across the field of vanished years. Sand poured and streamed

aside, laying bare the Past.

For down the enormous vista into which he gazed, as into an avenue

running a million miles towards a tiny point, he saw this moving Thing

that came towards him, shaking loose the countless veils of sand the

ages had swathed about it. The Ka of buried Egypt wakened out of sleep.

She had heard the potent summons of her old, time-honoured ritual. She

came. She stretched forth an arm towards the worshippers who evoked her.

Out of the Desert, out of the leagues of sand, out of the immeasurable

wilderness which was her mummied Form and Body, she rose and came. And

this fragment of her he would actually see--this little portion that was

obedient to the stammered and broken ceremonial. The partial revelation

he would witness--yet so vast, even this little bit of it, that it came

as a Procession and a host.

For a moment there was nothing. And then the voice of the woman rose in

a resounding cry that filled the Wadi to its furthest precipices, before

it died away again to silence. That a human voice could produce such

volume, accent, depth, seemed half incredible. The walls of towering

sand swallowed it instantly. But the Procession of life, needing a

group, a host, an army for its physical expression, reached at that

moment the nearer end of the huge avenue. It touched the Present; it

entered the world of men.

X

The entire range of Henriot's experience, read, imagined, dreamed, then

fainted into unreality before the sheer wonder of what he saw. In the

brief interval it takes to snap the fingers the climax was thus so

hurriedly upon him. And, through it all, he was clearly aware of the

pair of little human figures, man and woman, standing erect and

commanding at the centre--knew, too, that she directed and controlled,

while he in some secondary fashion supported her--and ever watched. But

both were dim, dropped somewhere into a lesser scale. It was the

knowledge of their presence, however, that alone enabled him to keep his

powers in hand at all. But for these two _human_ beings there within

possible reach, he must have closed his eyes and swooned.

For a tempest that seemed to toss loose stars about the sky swept round

about him, pouring up the pillared avenue in front of the procession. A

blast of giant energy, of liberty, came through. Forwards and backwards,

circling spirally about him like a whirlwind, came this revival of Life

that sought to dip itself once more in matter and in form. It came to

the accurate out-line of its form they had traced for it. He held his

mind steady enough to realise that it was akin to what men call a

"descent" of some "spiritual movement" that wakens a body of believers

into faith--a race, an entire nation; only that he experienced it in

this brief, concentrated form before it has scattered down into ten

thousand hearts. Here he knew its source and essence, behind the veil.

Crudely, unmanageable as yet, he felt it, rushing loose behind

appearances. There was this amazing impact of a twisting, swinging force

that stormed down as though it would bend and coil the very ribs of the

old stubborn hills. It sought to warm them with the stress of its own

irresistible life-stream, to beat them into shape, and make pliable

their obstinate resistance. Through all things the impulse poured and

spread, like fire at white heat.

Yet nothing visible came as yet, no alteration in the actual landscape,

no sign of change in things familiar to his eyes, while impetus thus

fought against inertia. He perceived nothing form-al. Calm and untouched

himself, he lay outside the circle of evocation, watching, waiting,

scarcely daring to breathe, yet well aware that any minute the scene

would transfer itself from memory that was subjective to matter that was

objective.

And then, in a flash, the bridge was built, and the transfer was

accomplished. How or where he did not see, he could not tell. It was

there before he knew it--there before his normal, earthly sight. He saw

it, as he saw the hands he was holding stupidly up to shield his face.

For this terrific release of force long held back, long stored up,

latent for centuries, came pouring down the empty Wadi bed prepared for

its reception. Through stones and sand and boulders it came in an

impetuous hurricane of power. The liberation of its life appalled him.

All that was free, untied, responded instantly like chaff; loose objects

fled towards it; there was a yielding in the hills and precipices; and

even in the mass of Desert which provided their foundation. The hinges

of the Sand went creaking in the night. It shaped for itself a bodily

outline.

Yet, most strangely, nothing definitely moved. How could he express the

violent contradiction? For the immobility was apparent only--a sham, a

counterfeit; while behind it the essential _being_ of these things did

rush and shift and alter. He saw the two things side by side: the outer

immobility the senses commonly agree upon, _and_ this amazing flying-out

of their inner, invisible substance towards the vortex of attracting

life that sucked them in. For stubborn matter turned docile before the

stress of this returning life, taught somewhere to be plastic. It was

being moulded into an approach to bodily outline. A mobile elasticity

invaded rigid substance. The two officiating human beings, safe at the

stationary centre, and himself, just outside the circle of operation,

alone remained untouched and unaffected. But a few feet in any

direction, for any one of them, meant--instantaneous death. They would

be absorbed into the vortex, mere corpuscles pressed into the service of

this sphere of action of a mighty Body....

How these perceptions reached him with such conviction, Henriot could

never say. He knew it, because he _felt_ it. Something fell about him

from the sky that already paled towards the dawn. The stars themselves,

it seemed, contributed some part of the terrific, flowing impulse that

conquered matter and shaped itself this physical expression.

Then, before he was able to fashion any preconceived idea of what

visible form this potent life might assume, he was aware of further

change. It came at the briefest possible interval after the

beginning--this certainty that, to and fro about him, as yet however

indeterminate, passed Magnitudes that were stupendous as the desert.

There was beauty in them too, though a terrible beauty hardly of this

earth at all. A fragment of old Egypt had returned--a little portion of

that vast Body of Belief that once was Egypt. Evoked by the worship of

one human heart, passionately sincere, the Ka of Egypt stepped back to

visit the material it once informed--the Sand.

Yet only a portion came. Henriot clearly realised that. It stretched

forth an arm. Finding no mass of worshippers through whom it might

express itself completely, it pressed inanimate matter thus into its

service.

Here was the beginning the woman had spoken of--little opening clue.

Entire reconstruction lay perhaps beyond.

And Henriot next realised that these Magnitudes in which this

group-energy sought to clothe itself as visible form, were curiously

familiar. It was not a new thing that he would see. Booming softly as

they dropped downwards through the sky, with a motion the size of them

rendered delusive, they trooped up the Avenue towards the central point

that summoned them. He realised the giant flock of them--descent of

fearful beauty--outlining a type of life denied to the world for ages,

countless as this sand that blew against his skin. Careering over the

waste of Desert moved the army of dark Splendours, that dwarfed any

organic structure called a body men have ever known. He recognised them,

cold in him of death, though the outlines reared higher than the

pyramids, and towered up to hide whole groups of stars. Yes, he

recognised them in their partial revelation, though he never saw the

monstrous host complete. But, one of them, he realised, posing its

eternal riddle to the sands, had of old been glimpsed sufficiently to

seize its form in stone,--yet poorly seized, as a doll may stand for the

dignity of a human being or a child's toy represent an engine that draws

trains....

And he knelt there on his narrow ledge, the world of men forgotten. The

power that caught him was too great a thing for wonder or for fear; he

even felt no awe. Sensation of any kind that can be named or realised

left him utterly. He forgot himself. He merely watched. The glory numbed

him. Block and pencil, as the reason of his presence there at all, no

longer existed....

Yet one small link remained that held him to some kind of consciousness

of earthly things: he never lost sight of this--that, being just outside

the circle of evocation, he was safe, and that the man and woman, being

stationary in its untouched centre, were also safe. But--that a movement

of six inches in any direction meant for any one of them instant death.

What was it, then, that suddenly strengthened this solitary link so that

the chain tautened and he felt the pull of it? Henriot could not say. He

came back with the rush of a descending drop to the realisation--dimly,

vaguely, as from great distance--that he was with these two, now at this

moment, in the Wadi Hof, and that the cold of dawn was in the air about

him. The chill breath of the Desert made him shiver.

But at first, so deeply had his soul been dipped in this fragment of

ancient worship, he could remember nothing more. Somewhere lay a little

spot of streets and houses; its name escaped him. He had once been

there; there were many people, but insignificant people. Who were they?

And what had he to do with them? All recent memories had been drowned in

the tide that flooded him from an immeasurable Past.

And who were they--these two beings, standing on the white floor of sand

below him? For a long time he could not recover their names. Yet he

remembered them; and, thus robbed of association that names bring, he

saw them for an instant naked, and knew that one of them was evil. One

of them was vile. Blackness touched the picture there. The man, his name

still out of reach, was sinister, impure and dark at the heart. And for

this reason the evocation had been partial only. The admixture of an

evil motive was the flaw that marred complete success.

The names then flashed upon him--Lady Statham--Richard

Vance.

Vance! With a horrid drop from splendour into something mean

and sordid, Henriot felt the pain of it. The motive of the man was

so insignificant, his purpose so atrocious. More and more, with the

name, came back--his first repugnance, fear, suspicion. And human

terror caught him. He shrieked. But, as in nightmare, no sound escaped

his lips. He tried to move; a wild desire to interfere, to protect,

to prevent, flung him forward--close to the dizzy edge of the

gulf below. But his muscles refused obedience to the will. The

paralysis of common fear rooted him to the rocks.

But the sudden change of focus instantly destroyed the picture;

and so vehement was the fall from glory into meanness, that it dislocated

the machinery of clairvoyant vision. The inner perception

clouded and grew dark. Outer and inner mingled in violent, inextricable

confusion. The wrench seemed almost physical. It happened

all at once, retreat and continuation for a moment somehow combined.

And, if he did not definitely see the awful thing, at least he

was aware that it had come to pass. He knew it as positively as

though his eye were glued against a magnifying lens in the stillness

of some laboratory. He witnessed it.

The supreme moment of evocation was close. Life, through that

awful sandy vortex, whirled and raged. Loose particles showered

and pelted, caught by the draught of vehement life that moulded the

substance of the Desert into imperial outline--when, suddenly, shot

the little evil thing across that marred and blasted it.

Into the whirlpool flew forward a particle of material that was a

human being. And the Group-Soul caught and used it.

The actual accomplishment Henriot did not claim to see. He was

a witness, but a witness who could give no evidence. Whether the

woman was pushed of set intention, or whether some detail of

sound and pattern was falsely used to effect the terrible result, he

was helpless to determine. He pretends no itemised account. She

went. In one second, with appalling swiftness, she disappeared,

swallowed out of space and time within that awful maw--one little

corpuscle among a million through which the Life, now stalking the

Desert wastes, moulded itself a troop-like Body. Sand took her.

There followed emptiness--a hush of unutterable silence, stillness,

peace. Movement and sound instantly retired whence they

came. The avenues of Memory closed; the Splendours all went

down into their sandy tombs....

* * * * *

The moon had sunk into the Libyan wilderness; the eastern sky was

red. The dawn drew out that wondrous sweetness of the Desert,

which is as sister to the sweetness that the moonlight brings. The

Desert settled back to sleep, huge, unfathomable, charged to the

brim with life that watches, waits, and yet conceals itself behind

the ruins of apparent desolation. And the Wadi, empty at his feet,

filled slowly with the gentle little winds that bring the sunrise.

Then, across the pale glimmering of sand, Henriot saw a figure

moving. It came quickly towards him, yet unsteadily, and with a

hurry that was ugly. Vance was on the way to fetch him. And the

horror of the man's approach struck him like a hammer in the face.

He closed his eyes, sinking back to hide.

But, before he swooned, there reached him the clatter of the

murderer's tread as he began to climb over the splintered rocks, and

the faint echo of his voice, calling him by name--falsely and in

pretence--for help.