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