[Illustration: SAND]
I
As Felix Henriot came through the streets that January night the fog
was stifling, but when he reached his little flat upon the top floor
there came a sound of wind. Wind was stirring about the world. It blew
against his windows, but at first so faintly that he hardly noticed it.
Then, with an abrupt rise and fall like a wailing voice that sought to
claim attention, it called him. He peered through the window into the
blurred darkness, listening.
There is no cry in the world like that of the homeless wind. A vague
excitement, scarcely to be analysed, ran through his blood. The curtain
of fog waved momentarily aside. Henriot fancied a star peeped down at
him.
‘It will change things a bit--at last,’ he sighed, settling back into
his chair. ‘It will bring movement!’
Already something in himself had changed. A restlessness, as of that
wandering wind, woke in his heart--the desire to be off and away. Other
things could rouse this wildness too: falling water, the singing of a
bird, an odour of wood-fire, a glimpse of winding road. But the cry
of wind, always searching, questioning, travelling the world’s great
routes, remained ever the master-touch. High longing took his mood in
hand. Mid seven millions he felt suddenly--lonely.
‘I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.’
He murmured the words over softly to himself. The emotion that produced
Innisfree passed strongly through him. He too would be over the hills
and far away. He craved movement, change, adventure--somewhere far from
shops and crowds and motor-’busses. For a week the fog had stifled
London. This wind brought life.
Where should he go? Desire was long; his purse was short.
He glanced at his books, letters, newspapers. They had no interest
now. Instead he listened. The panorama of other journeys rolled in
colour through the little room, flying on one another’s heels. Henriot
enjoyed this remembered essence of his travels more than the travels
themselves. The crying wind brought so many voices, all of them
seductive:
There was a soft crashing of waves upon the Black Sea shores, where the
huge Caucasus beckoned in the sky beyond; a rustling in the umbrella
pines and cactus at Marseilles, whence magic steamers start about the
world like flying dreams. He heard the plash of fountains upon Mount
Ida’s slopes, and the whisper of the tamarisk on Marathon. It was
dawn once more upon the Ionian Sea, and he smelt the perfume of the
Cyclades. Blue-veiled islands melted in the sunshine, and across the
dewy lawns of Tempe, moistened by the spray of many water-falls, he
saw--Great Heavens above!--the dancing of white forms ... or was it
only mist the sunshine painted against Pelion?... ‘Methought, among
the lawns together, we wandered underneath the young grey dawn.
And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds shepherded by the slow,
unwilling wind....’
And then, into his stuffy room, slipped the singing perfume of a
wall-flower on a ruined tower, and with it the sweetness of hot ivy. He
heard the ‘yellow bees in the ivy bloom.’ Wind whipped over the open
hills--this very wind that laboured drearily through the London fog.
And--he was caught. The darkness melted from the city. The fog whisked
off into an azure sky. The roar of traffic turned into booming of the
sea. There was a whistling among cordage, and the floor swayed to and
fro. He saw a sailor touch his cap and pocket the two-franc piece. The
syren hooted--ominous sound that had started him on many a journey of
adventure--and the roar of London became mere insignificant clatter of
a child’s toy carriages.
He loved that syren’s call; there was something deep and pitiless in
it. It drew the wanderers forth from cities everywhere: ‘Leave your
known world behind you, and come with me for better or for worse! The
anchor is up; it is too late to change. Only--beware! You shall know
curious things--and alone!’
Henriot stirred uneasily in his chair. He turned with sudden energy to
the shelf of guide-books, maps and time-tables--possessions he most
valued in the whole room. He was a happy-go-lucky, adventure-loving
soul, careless of common standards, athirst ever for the new and
strange.
‘That’s the best of having a cheap flat,’ he laughed, ‘and no ties in
the world. I can turn the key and disappear. No one cares or knows--no
one but the thieving caretaker. And he’s long ago found out that
there’s nothing here worth taking!’
There followed then no lengthy indecision. Preparation was even shorter
still. He was always ready for a move, and his sojourn in cities was
but breathing-space while he gathered pennies for further wanderings.
An enormous kit-bag--sack-shaped, very worn and dirty--emerged speedily
from the bottom of a cupboard in the wall. It was of limitless
capacity. The key and padlock rattled in its depths. Cigarette ashes
covered everything while he stuffed it full of ancient, indescribable
garments. And his voice, singing of those ‘yellow bees in the ivy
bloom,’ mingled with the crying of the rising wind about his windows.
His restlessness had disappeared by magic.
This time, however, there could be no haunted Pelion, nor shady groves
of Tempe, for he lived in sophisticated times when money markets
regulated movement sternly. Travelling was only for the rich; mere
wanderers must pig it. He remembered instead an opportune invitation
to the Desert. ‘Objective’ invitation, his genial hosts had called
it, knowing his hatred of convention. And Helouan danced into letters
of brilliance upon the inner map of his mind. For Egypt had ever held
his spirit in thrall, though as yet he had tried in vain to touch
the great buried soul of her. The excavators, the Egyptologists, the
archaeologists most of all, plastered her grey ancient face with labels
like hotel advertisements on travellers’ portmanteaux. They told where
she had come from last, but nothing of what she dreamed and thought
and loved. The heart of Egypt lay beneath the sand, and the trifling
robbery of little details that poked forth from tombs and temples
brought no true revelation of her stupendous spiritual splendour.
Henriot, in his youth, had searched and dived among what material he
could find, believing once--or half believing--that the ceremonial
of that ancient system veiled a weight of symbol that was reflected
from genuine supersensual knowledge. The rituals, now taken literally,
and so pityingly explained away, had once been genuine pathways of
approach. But never yet, and least of all in his previous visits to
Egypt itself, had he discovered one single person, worthy of speech,
who caught at his idea. ‘Curious,’ they said, then turned away--to go
on digging in the sand. Sand smothered her world to-day. Excavators
discovered skeletons. Museums everywhere stored them--grinning, literal
relics that told nothing.
But now, while he packed and sang, these hopes of enthusiastic younger
days stirred again--because the emotion that gave them birth was real
and true in him. Through the morning mists upon the Nile an old pyramid
bowed hugely at him across London roofs: ‘Come,’ he heard its awful
whisper beneath the ceiling, ‘I have things to show you, and to tell.’
He saw the flock of them sailing the Desert like weird grey solemn
ships that make no earthly port. And he imagined them as one: multiple
expressions of some single unearthly portent they adumbrated in mighty
form--dead symbols of some spiritual conception long vanished from the
world.
‘I mustn’t dream like this,’ he laughed, ‘or I shall get absent-minded
and pack fire-tongs instead of boots. It looks like a jumble sale
already!’
And he stood on a heap of things to wedge them down still tighter.
But the pictures would not cease. He saw the kites circling high in the
blue air. A couple of white vultures flapped lazily away over shining
miles. Felucca sails, like giant wings emerging from the ground, curved
towards him from the Nile. The palm-trees dropped long shadows over
Memphis. He felt the delicious, drenching heat, and the Khamasin, that
over-wind from Nubia, brushed his very cheeks. In the little gardens
the mish-mish was in bloom.... He smelt the Desert ... grey sepulchre
of cancelled cycles.... The stillness of her interminable reaches
dropped down upon old London....
The magic of the sand stole round him in its silent-footed tempest.
And while he struggled with that strange, capacious sack, the piles of
clothing ran into shapes of gleaming Bedouin faces; London garments
settled down with the mournful sound of camels’ feet, half dropping
wind, half water flowing underground--sound that old Time has brought
over into modern life and left a moment for our wonder and perhaps our
tears.
He rose at length with the excitement of some deep enchantment in his
eyes. The thought of Egypt plunged ever so deeply into him, carrying
him into depths where he found it difficult to breathe, so strangely
far away it seemed, yet indefinably familiar. He lost his way. A touch
or fear came with it.
‘A sack like that is the wonder of the world,’ he laughed again,
kicking the unwieldy, sausage-shaped monster into a corner of the
room, and sitting down to write the thrilling labels: ‘Felix Henriot,
Alexandria _via_ Marseilles.’ But his pen blotted the letters; there
was sand in it. He rewrote the words. Then he remembered a dozen things
he had left out. Impatiently, yet with confusion somewhere, he stuffed
them in. They ran away into shifting heaps; they disappeared; they
emerged suddenly again. It was like packing hot, dry, flowing sand.
From the pockets of a coat--he had worn it last summer down Dorset
way--out trickled sand. There was sand in his mind and thoughts.
And his dreams that night were full of winds, the old sad winds of
Egypt, and of moving, sifting sand. Arabs and Afreets danced amazingly
together across dunes he could never reach. For he could not follow
fast enough. Something infinitely older than these ever caught his
feet and held him back. A million tiny fingers stung and pricked him.
Something flung a veil before his eyes. Once it touched him--his face
and hands and neck. ‘Stay here with us,’ he heard a host of muffled
voices crying, but their sound was smothered, buried, rising through
the ground. A myriad throats were choked. Till, at last, with a
violent effort he turned and seized it. And then the thing he grasped
at slipped between his fingers and ran easily away. It had a grey and
yellow face, and it moved through all its parts. It flowed as water
flows, and yet was solid. It was centuries old.
He cried out to it. ‘Who are you? What is your name? I surely know you
... but I have forgotten...?’
And it stopped, turning from far away its great uncovered countenance
of nameless colouring. He caught a voice. It rolled and boomed and
whispered like the wind. And then he woke, with a curious shaking in
his heart, and a little touch of chilly perspiration on the skin.
But the voice seemed in the room still--close beside him:
‘I am the Sand,’ he heard, before it died away.
* * * * *
And next he realised that the glitter of Paris lay behind him, and a
steamer was taking him with much unnecessary motion across a sparkling
sea towards Alexandria. Gladly he saw the Riviera fade below the
horizon, with its hard bright sunshine, treacherous winds, and its
smear of rich, conventional English. All restlessness now had left him.
True vagabond still at forty, he only felt the unrest and discomfort
of life when caught in the network of routine and rigid streets, no
chance of breaking loose. He was off again at last, money scarce enough
indeed, but the joy of wandering expressing itself in happy emotions of
release. Every warning of calculation was stifled. He thought of the
American woman who walked out of her Long Island house one summer’s day
to look at a passing sail--and was gone eight years before she walked
in again. Eight years of roving travel! He had always felt respect and
admiration for that woman.
For Felix Henriot, with his admixture of foreign blood, was philosopher
as well as vagabond, a strong poetic and religious strain sometimes
breaking out through fissures in his complex nature. He had seen much
life; had read many books. The passionate desire of youth to solve the
world’s big riddles had given place to a resignation filled to the brim
with wonder. Anything _might_ be true. Nothing surprised him. The most
outlandish beliefs, for all he knew, might fringe truth somewhere. He
had escaped that cheap cynicism with which disappointed men soothe
their vanity when they realise that an intelligible explanation of the
universe lies beyond their powers. He no longer expected final answers.
For him, even the smallest journeys held the spice of some adventure;
all minutes were loaded with enticing potentialities. And they shaped
for themselves somehow a dramatic form. ‘It’s like a story,’ his
friends said when he told his travels. It always was a story.
But the adventure that lay waiting for him where the silent streets of
little Helouan kiss the great Desert’s lips, was of a different kind
to any Henriot had yet encountered. Looking back, he has often asked
himself, ‘How in the world can I accept it?’
And, perhaps, he never yet has accepted it. It was sand that brought
it. For the Desert, the stupendous thing that mothers little Helouan,
produced it.