It was so simple a manœuvre 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 manœuvre 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 formulæ
of incantation of the oldest known rescension 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 ancient Egypt.