For some days Henriot saw little of the man who came from Birmingham
and pushed curiosity to a climax by asking for a compass in the middle
of the night. For one thing, he was a good deal with his friends upon
the other side of Helouan, and for another, he slept several nights in
the Desert.
He loved the gigantic peace the Desert gave him. The world was
forgotten there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it.
Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.
An Arab boy and donkey took out sleeping-bag, food and water to the
Wadi Hof, a desolate gorge about an hour eastwards. It winds between
cliffs whose summits rise some thousand feet above the sea. It opens
suddenly, cut deep into the swaying world of level plateaux and
undulating hills. It moves about too; he never found it in the same
place twice--like an arm of the Desert that shifted with the changing
lights. Here he watched dawns and sunsets, slept through the mid-day
heat, and enjoyed the unearthly colouring that swept Day and Night
across the huge horizons. In solitude the Desert soaked down into him.
At night the jackals cried in the darkness round his cautiously-fed
camp fire--small, because wood had to be carried--and in the daytime
kites circled overhead to inspect him, and an occasional white vulture
flapped across the blue. The weird desolation of this rocky valley, he
thought, was like the scenery of the moon. He took no watch with him,
and the arrival of the donkey boy an hour after sunrise came almost
from another planet, bringing things of time and common life out of
some distant gulf where they had lain forgotten among lost ages.
The short hour of twilight brought, too, a bewitchment into the silence
that was a little less than comfortable. Full light or darkness he
could manage, but this time of half things made him want to shut his
eyes and hide. Its effect stepped over imagination. The mind got lost.
He could not understand it. For the cliffs and boulders of discoloured
limestone shone then with an inward glow that signalled to the Desert
with veiled lanterns. The misshapen hills, carved by wind and rain into
ominous outlines, stirred and nodded. In the morning light they retired
into themselves, asleep. But at dusk the tide retreated. They rose from
the sea, emerging naked, threatening. They ran together and joined
shoulders, the entire army of them. And the glow of their sandy bodies,
self-luminous, continued even beneath the stars. Only the moonlight
drowned it. For the moonrise over the Mokattam Hills brought a white,
grand loveliness that drenched the entire Desert. It drew a marvellous
sweetness from the sand. It shone across a world as yet unfinished,
whereon no life might show itself for ages yet to come. He was alone
then upon an empty star, before the creation of things that breathed
and moved.
What impressed him, however, more than everything else was the enormous
vitality that rose out of all this apparent death. There was no hint of
the melancholy that belongs commonly to flatness; the sadness of wide,
monotonous landscape was not here. The endless repetition of sweeping
vale and plateau brought infinity within measurable comprehension.
He grasped a definite meaning in the phrase ‘world without end’: the
Desert had no end and no beginning. It gave him a sense of eternal
peace, the silent peace that star-fields know. Instead of subduing
the soul with bewilderment, it inspired with courage, confidence,
hope. Through this sand which was the wreck of countless geological
ages, rushed life that was terrific and uplifting, too huge to include
melancholy, too deep to betray itself in movement. Here was the
stillness of eternity. Behind the spread grey masque of apparent death
lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point. In
the Desert he felt himself absolutely royal.
And this contrast of Life, veiling itself in Death, was a contradiction
that somehow intoxicated. The Desert exhilaration never left him. He
was never alone. A companionship of millions went with him, and he
_felt_ the Desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains
of sand.
It was the Khamasin, the hot wind bringing sand, that drove him
in--with the feeling that these few days and nights had been
immeasurable, and that he had been away a thousand years. He came
back with the magic of the Desert in his blood, hotel-life tasteless
and insipid by comparison. To human impressions thus he was fresh and
vividly sensitive. His being, cleaned and sensitized by pure grandeur,
‘felt’ people--for a time at any rate--with an uncommon sharpness of
receptive judgment. He returned to a life somehow mean and meagre,
resuming insignificance with his dinner jacket. Out with the sand
he had been regal; now, like a slave, he strutted self-conscious and
reduced.
But this imperial standard of the Desert stayed a little time beside
him, its purity focussing judgment like a lens. The specks of smaller
emotions left it clear at first, and as his eye wandered vaguely over
the people assembled in the dining-room, it was arrested with a vivid
shock upon two figures at the little table facing him.
He had forgotten Vance, the Birmingham man who sought the North at
midnight with a pocket compass. He now saw him again, with an intuitive
discernment entirely fresh. Before memory brought up her clouding
associations, some brilliance flashed a light upon him. ‘That man,’
Henriot thought, ‘might have come with me. He would have understood
and loved it!’ But the thought was really this--a moment’s reflection
spread it, rather: ‘He belongs somewhere to the Desert; the Desert
brought him out here.’ And, again, hidden swiftly behind it like a
movement running below water--‘What does he want with it? What is the
deeper motive he conceals? For there _is_ a deeper motive; and it _is_
concealed.’
But it was the woman seated next him who absorbed his attention really,
even while this thought flashed and went its way. The empty chair was
occupied at last. Unlike his first encounter with the man, she looked
straight at him. Their eyes met fully. For several seconds there was
steady mutual inspection, while her penetrating stare, intent without
being rude, passed searchingly all over his face. It was disconcerting.
Crumbling his bread, he looked equally hard at her, unable to turn
away, determined not to be the first to shift his gaze. And when at
length she lowered her eyes he felt that many things had happened,
as in a long period of intimate conversation. Her mind had judged him
through and through. Questions and answer flashed. They were no longer
strangers. For the rest of dinner, though he was careful to avoid
direct inspection, he was aware that she felt his presence and was
secretly speaking with him. She asked questions beneath her breath.
The answers rose with the quickened pulses in his blood. Moreover, she
explained Richard Vance. It was this woman’s power that shone reflected
in the man. She was the one who knew the big, unusual things. Vance
merely echoed the rush of her vital personality.
This was the first impression that he got--from the most striking,
curious face he had ever seen in a woman. It remained very near him all
through the meal: she had moved to his table, it seemed she sat beside
him. Their minds certainly knew contact from that moment.
It is never difficult to credit strangers with the qualities and
knowledge that oneself craves for, and no doubt Henriot’s active fancy
went busily to work. But, none the less, this thing remained and grew:
that this woman was aware of the hidden things of Egypt he had always
longed to know. There was knowledge and guidance she could impart. Her
soul was searching among ancient things. Her face brought the Desert
back into his thoughts. And with it came--the sand.
Here was the flash. The sight of her restored the peace and splendour
he had left behind him in his Desert camps. The rest, of course, was
what his imagination constructed upon this slender basis. Only,--not
all of it was imagination.
Now, Henriot knew little enough of women, and had no pose of
‘understanding’ them. His experience was of the slightest; the love
and veneration felt for his own mother had set the entire sex upon
the heights. His affairs with women, if so they may be called, had
been transient--all but those of early youth, which having never known
the devastating test of fulfilment, still remained ideal and superb.
There was unconscious humour in his attitude--from a distance; for
he regarded women with wonder and respect, as puzzles that sweetened
but complicated life, might even endanger it. He certainly was not
a marrying man! But now, as he felt the presence of this woman so
deliberately possess him, there came over him two clear, strong
messages, each vivid with certainty. One was that banal suggestion
of familiarity claimed by lovers and the like--he had often heard of
it--‘I have known that woman before; I have met her ages ago somewhere;
she is strangely familiar to me’; and the other, growing out of it
almost: ‘Have nothing to do with her; she will bring you trouble and
confusion; avoid her, and be warned’;--in fact, a distinct presentiment.
Yet, although Henriot dismissed both impressions as having no shred of
evidence to justify them, the original clear judgment, as he studied
her extraordinary countenance, persisted through all denials. The
familiarity, and the presentiment, remained. There also remained this
other--an enormous imaginative leap!--that she could teach him ‘Egypt.’
He watched her carefully, in a sense fascinated. He could only describe
the face as black, so dark it was with the darkness of great age.
Elderly was the obvious, natural word; but elderly described the
features only. The expression of the face wore centuries. Nor was it
merely the coal-black eyes that betrayed an ancient, age-travelled soul
behind them. The entire presentment mysteriously conveyed it. This
woman’s heart knew long-forgotten things--the thought kept beating up
against him. There were cheek-bones, oddly high, that made him think
involuntarily of the well-advertised Pharaoh, Ramases; a square, deep
jaw; and an aquiline nose that gave the final touch of power. For the
power undeniably was there, and while the general effect had grimness
in it, there was neither harshness nor any forbidding touch about it.
There was an implacable sternness in the set of lips and jaw, and, most
curious of all, the eyelids over the steady eyes of black were level as
a ruler. This level framing made the woman’s stare remarkable beyond
description. Henriot thought of an idol carved in stone, stone hard and
black, with eyes that stared across the sand into a world of things
non-human, very far away, forgotten of men. The face was finely ugly.
This strange dark beauty flashed flame about it.
And, as the way ever was with him, Henriot next fell to constructing
the possible lives of herself and her companion, though without much
success. Imagination soon stopped dead. She was not old enough to
be Vance’s mother, and assuredly she was not his wife. His interest
was more than merely piqued--it was puzzled uncommonly. What was
the contrast that made the man seem beside her--vile? Whence came,
too, the impression that she exercised some strong authority, though
never directly exercised, that held him at her mercy? How did he
guess that the man resented it, yet did not dare oppose, and that,
apparently acquiescing good-humouredly, his will was deliberately held
in abeyance, and that he waited sulkily, biding his time? There was
furtiveness in every gesture and expression. A hidden motive lurked in
him; unworthiness somewhere; he was determined yet ashamed. He watched
her ceaselessly and with such uncanny closeness.
Henriot imagined he divined all this. He leaped to the guess that his
expenses were being paid. A good deal more was being paid besides. She
was a rich relation, from whom he had expectations; he was serving his
seven years, ashamed of his servitude, ever calculating escape--but,
perhaps, no ordinary escape. A faint shudder ran over him. He drew in
the reins of imagination.
Of course, the probabilities were that he was hopelessly astray--one
usually is on such occasions--but this time, it so happened, he was
singularly right. Before one thing only his ready invention stopped
every time. This vileness, this notion of unworthiness in Vance, could
not be negative merely. A man with that face was no inactive weakling.
The motive he was at such pains to conceal, betraying its existence by
that very fact, moved, surely, towards aggressive action. Disguised,
it never slept. Vance was sharply on the alert. He had a plan deep out
of sight. And Henriot remembered how the man’s soft approach along
the carpeted corridor had made him start. He recalled the quasi shock
it gave him. He thought again of the feeling of discomfort he had
experienced.
Next, his eager fancy sought to plumb the business these two had
together in Egypt--in the Desert. For the Desert, he felt convinced,
had brought them out. But here, though he constructed numerous
explanations, another barrier stopped him. Because he _knew_. This
woman was in touch with that aspect of ancient Egypt he himself had
ever sought in vain; and not merely with stones the sand had buried so
deep, but with the meanings they once represented, buried so utterly by
the sands of later thought.
And here, being ignorant, he found no clue that could lead to any
satisfactory result, for he possessed no knowledge that might guide
him. He floundered--until Fate helped him. And the instant Fate helped
him, the warning and presentiment he had dismissed as fanciful, became
real again. He hesitated. Caution acted. He would think twice before
taking steps to form acquaintance. ‘Better not,’ thought whispered.
‘Better leave them alone, this queer couple. They’re after things that
won’t do you any good.’ This idea of mischief, almost of danger, in
their purposes was oddly insistent; for what could possibly convey it?
But, while he hesitated, Fate, who sent the warning, pushed him at the
same time into the circle of their lives: at first tentatively--he
might still have escaped; but soon urgently--curiosity led him
inexorably towards the end.