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 indescribable 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 Lybian

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 Lybian 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 Lybian 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 mazelike 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 informed. 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 outline 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 lifestream, 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.