looked up at him because of the way he said it. A hurried movement ran
through the merry party, and the girls were on their donkeys quickly,
not wishing to be left to bring up the rear. They clattered off. The
boys cried; the thud of sticks was heard; hoofs shuffled through the
sand and stones. In single file the picnickers headed for Helouan, some
five miles distant. And the desert closed up behind them as they went,
following in a shadowy wave that never broke, noiseless, foamless,
unstreaked, driven by no wind, and of a volume undiscoverable. Against
the orange sunset the Pyramids turned deep purple. The strip of silvery
Nile among its palm trees looked like rising mist. In the incredible
Egyptian afterglow the enormous horizons burned a little longer, then
went out. The ball of the earth--a huge round globe that bulged--curved
visibly as at sea. It was no longer a flat expanse; it turned. Its
splendid curves were realised.
"Better put wraps on; it's cold and the sun is low"--and then the
curious hurry to get back among the houses and the haunts of men. No
more was said, perhaps, than this, yet, the time and place being what
they were, the mind became suddenly aware of that quality which ever
brings a certain shrinking with it--vastness; and more than vastness:
that which is endless because it is also beginningless--eternity. A
colossal splendour stole upon the heart, and the senses, unaccustomed
to the unusual stretch, reeled a little, as though the wonder was
more than could be faced with comfort. Not all, doubtless, realised
it, though to two, at least, it came with a staggering impact there
was no withstanding. For, while the luminous greys and purples crept
round them from the sandy wastes, the hearts of these two became
aware of certain common things whose simple majesty is usually dulled
by mere familiarity. Neither the man nor the girl knew for certain
that the other felt it, as they brought up the rear together; yet
the fact that each _did_ feel it set them side by side in the same
strange circle--and made them silent. They realised the immensity of
a moment: the dizzy stretch of time that led up to the casual pinning
of a veil; to the tightening of a stirrup strap; to the little speech
with a companion; the roar of the vanished centuries that have ground
mountains into sand and spread them over the floor of Africa; above
all, to the little truth that they themselves existed amid the whirl of
stupendous systems all delicately balanced as a spider's web--that they
were _alive_.
For a moment this vast scale of reality revealed itself, then
hid swiftly again behind the débris of the obvious. The universe,
containing their two tiny yet important selves, stood still for an
instant before their eyes. They looked at it--realised that they
belonged to it. Everything moved and had its being, _lived_--here in
this silent, empty desert even more actively than in a city of crowded
houses. The quiet Nile, sighing with age, passed down towards the sea;
there loomed the menacing Pyramids across the twilight; beneath them,
in monstrous dignity, crouched that Shadow from whose eyes of battered
stone proceeds the nameless thing that contracts the heart, then opens
it again to terror; and everywhere, from towering monoliths as from
secret tombs, rose that strange, long whisper which, defying time and
distance, laughs at death. The spell of Egypt, which is the spell of
immortality, touched their hearts.
Already, as the group of picnickers rode homewards now, the first
stars twinkled overhead, and the peerless Egyptian night was on the
way. There was hurry in the passing of the dusk. And the cold sensibly
increased.
"So you did no painting after all," said Rivers to the girl who rode
a little in front of him, "for I never saw you touch your sketch-book
once."
They were some distance now behind the others; the line straggled; and
when no answer came he quickened his pace, drew up alongside and saw
that her eyes, in the reflection of the sunset, shone with moisture.
But she turned her head a little, smiling into his face, so that the
human and the non-human beauty came over him with an onset that was
almost shock. Neither one nor other, he knew, were long for him, and
the realisation fell upon him with a pang of actual physical pain. The
acuteness, the hopelessness of the realisation, for a moment, were more
than he could bear, stern of temper though he was, and he tried to pass
in front of her, urging his donkey with resounding strokes. Her own
animal, however, following the lead, at once came up with him.
"You felt it, perhaps, as I did," he said some moments later,
his voice quite steady again. "The stupendous, everlasting
thing--the--_life_ behind it all." He hesitated a little in his speech,
unable to find the substantive that could compass even a fragment of
his thought. She paused, too, similarly inarticulate before the surge
of incomprehensible feelings.
"It's--awful," she said, half laughing, yet the tone hushed and a
little quaver in it somewhere. And her voice to his was like the first
sound he had ever heard in the world, for the first sound a full-grown
man heard in the world would be beyond all telling--magical. "I shall
not try again," she continued, leaving out the laughter this time; "my
sketch-book is a farce. For, to tell the truth"--and the next three
words she said below her breath--"I dare not."
He turned and looked at her for a second. It seemed to him that the
following wave had caught them up, and was about to break above her,
too. But the big-brimmed hat and the streaming veil shrouded her
features. He saw, instead, the Universe. He felt as though he and
she had always, always been together, and always, always would be.
Separation was inconceivable.
"It came so close," she whispered. "It--shook me!"
They were cut off from their companions, whose voices sounded far
ahead. Her words might have been spoken by the darkness, or by some one
who peered at them from within that following wave. Yet the fanciful
phrase was better than any he could find. From the immeasurable space
of time and distance men's hearts vainly seek to plumb, it drew into
closer perspective a certain meaning that words may hardly compass,
a formidable truth that belongs to that deep place where hope and
doubt fight their incessant battle. The awe she spoke of was the
awe of immortality, of belonging to something that is endless and
beginningless.
And he understood that the tears and laughter were one--caused by
that spell which takes a little human life and shakes it, as an animal
shakes its prey that later shall feed its blood and increase its power
of growth. His other thoughts--really but a single thought--he had not
the right to utter. Pain this time easily routed hope as the wave came
nearer. For it was the wave of death that would shortly break, he knew,
over him, but not over her. Him it would sweep with its huge withdrawal
into the desert whence it came: her it would leave high upon the shores
of life--alone. And yet the separation would somehow not be real. They
were together in eternity even now. They were endless as this desert,
beginningless as this sky ... immortal. The realisation overwhelmed....
The lights of Helouan seemed to come no nearer as they rode on in
silence for the rest of the way. Against the dark background of the
Mokattam Hills these fairy lights twinkled brightly, hanging in
mid-air, but after an hour they were no closer than before. It was like
riding towards the stars. It would take centuries to reach them. There
were centuries in which to do so. Hurry has no place in the desert;
it is born in streets. The desert stands still; to go fast in it is
to go backwards. Now, in particular, its enormous, uncanny leisure
was everywhere--in keeping with that mighty scale the sunset had made
visible. His thoughts, like the steps of the weary animal that bore
him, had no progress in them. The serpent of eternity, holding its tail
in its own mouth, rose from the sand, enclosing himself, the stars--and
her. Behind him, in the hollows of that shadowy wave, the procession
of dynasties and conquests, the great series of gorgeous civilisations
the mind calls Past, stood still, crowded with shining eyes and
beckoning faces, still waiting to arrive. There is no death in Egypt.
His own death stood so close that he could touch it by stretching out
his hand, yet it seemed as much behind as in front of him. What man
called a beginning was a trick. There was no such thing. He was with
this girl--_now_, when Death waited so close for him--yet he had never
really begun. Their lives ran always parallel. The hand he stretched
to clasp approaching death caught instead in this girl's shadowy hair,
drawing her in with him to the centre where he breathed the eternity
of the desert. Yet expression of any sort was as futile as it was
unnecessary. To paint, to speak, to sing, even the slightest gesture of
the soul, became a crude and foolish thing. Silence was here the truth.
And they rode in silence towards the fairy lights.
Then suddenly the rocky ground rose up close before them; boulders
stood out vividly with black shadows and shining heads; a flat-roofed
house slid by; three palm trees rattled in the evening wind; beyond, a
mosque and minaret sailed upwards, like the spars and rigging of some
phantom craft; and the colonnades of the great modern hotel, standing
upon its dome of limestone ridge, loomed over them. Helouan was about
them before they knew it. The desert lay behind with its huge, arrested
billow. Slowly, owing to its prodigious volume, yet with a speed that
merged it instantly with the far horizon behind the night, this wave
now withdrew a little. There was no hurry. It came, for the moment, no
farther. Rivers knew. For he was in it to the throat. Only his head
was above the surface. He still could breathe--and speak--and see.
Deepening with every hour into an incalculable splendour, it waited.
2
In the street the foremost riders drew rein, and, two and two abreast,
the long line clattered past the shops and cafés, the railway station
and hotels, stared at by the natives from the busy pavements. The
donkeys stumbled, blinded by the electric light. Girls in white dresses
flitted here and there, arabîyehs rattled past with people hurrying
home to dress for dinner, and the evening train, just in from Cairo,
disgorged its stream of passengers. There were dances in several of the
hotels that night. Voices rose on all sides. Questions and answers,
engagements and appointments were made, little plans and plots and
intrigues for seizing happiness on the wing--before the wave rolled in
and caught the lot. They chattered gaily:
"You _are_ going, aren't you? You promised----"
"Of course I am."
"Then I'll drive you over. May I call for you?"
"All right. Come at ten."
"We shan't have finished our bridge by then. Say ten-thirty."
And eyes exchanged their meaning signals. The group dismounted and
dispersed. Arabs standing under the lebbekh trees, or squatting on
the pavements before their dim-lit booths, watched them with faces of
gleaming bronze. Rivers gave his bridle to a donkey-boy, and moved
across stiffly after the long ride to help the girl dismount. "You feel
tired?" he asked gently. "It's been a long day." For her face was white
as chalk, though the eyes shone brilliantly.
"Tired, perhaps," she answered, "but exhilarated too. I should like to
be there now. I should like to go back this minute--if some one would
take me." And, though she said it lightly, there was a meaning in her
voice he apparently chose to disregard. It was as if she knew his
secret. "Will you take me--some day soon?"
The direct question, spoken by those determined little lips, was
impossible to ignore. He looked close into her face as he helped her
from the saddle with a spring that brought her a moment half into
his arms. "Some day--soon. I will," he said with emphasis, "when you
are--ready." The pallor in her face, and a certain expression in it he
had not known before, startled him. "I think you have been overdoing
it," he added, with a tone in which authority and love were oddly
mingled, neither of them disguised.
"Like yourself," she smiled, shaking her skirts out and looking down at
her dusty shoes. "I've only a few days more--before I sail. We're both
in such a hurry, but you are the worst of the two."
"Because my time is even shorter," ran his horrified thought--for he
said no word.
She raised her eyes suddenly to his, with an expression that for an
instant almost convinced him she had guessed--and the soul in him
stood rigidly at attention, urging back the rising fires. The hair had
dropped loosely round the sun-burned neck. Her face was level with
his shoulder. Even the glare of the street lights could not make her
undesirable. But behind the gaze of the deep brown eyes another thing
looked forth imperatively into his own. And he recognised it with a
rush of terror, yet of singular exultation.
"It followed us all the way," she whispered. "It came after us from the
desert--where it _lives_."
"At the houses," he said equally low, "it stopped." He gladly adopted
her syncopated speech, for it helped him in his struggle to subdue
those rising fires.
For a second she hesitated. "You mean, if we had not left so soon--when
it turned cold. If we had not hurried--if we had remained a little
longer----"
He caught at her hand, unable to control himself, but dropped it
again the same second, while she made as though she had not noticed,
forgiving him with her eyes. "Or a great deal longer," she added
slowly--"for ever?"
And then he was certain that she _had_ guessed--not that he loved her
above all else in the world, for that was so obvious that a child might
know it, but that his silence was due to his other, lesser secret; that
the great Executioner stood waiting to drop the hood about his eyes. He
was already pinioned. Something in her gaze and in her manner persuaded
him suddenly that she understood.
His exhilaration increased extraordinarily. "I mean," he said very
quietly, "that the spell weakens here among the houses and among
the--so-called living." There was masterfulness, triumph, in his voice.
Very wonderfully he saw her smile change; she drew slightly closer to
his side, as though unable to resist. "Mingled with lesser things we
should not understand completely," he added softly.
"And that might be a mistake, you mean?" she asked quickly, her face
grave again.
It was his turn to hesitate a moment. The breeze stirred the hair about
her neck, bringing its faint perfume--perfume of young life--to his
nostrils. He drew his breath in deeply, smothering back the torrent of
rising words he knew were unpermissible. "Misunderstanding," he said
briefly. "If the eye be single----" He broke off, shaken by a paroxysm
of coughing. "You know my meaning," he continued, as soon as the attack
had passed; "you feel the difference _here_," pointing round him to
the hotels, the shops, the busy stream of people; "the hurry, the
excitement, the feverish, blinding child's play which pretends to be
alive, but does not know it----" And again the coughing stopped him.
This time she took his hand in her own, pressed it very slightly, then
released it. He felt it as the touch of that desert wave upon his soul.
"The reception must be in complete and utter resignation. Tainted by
lesser things, the disharmony might be----" he began stammeringly.
Again there came interruption, as the rest of the party called
impatiently to know if they were coming up to the hotel. He had not
time to find the completing adjective. Perhaps he could not find it
ever. Perhaps it does not exist in any modern language. Eternity is not
realised to-day; men have no time to know they are alive for ever; they
are too busy....
They all moved in a clattering, merry group towards the big hotel.
Rivers and the girl were separated.
3
There was a dance that evening, but neither of these took part in
it. In the great dining-room their tables were far apart. He could
not even see her across the sea of intervening heads and shoulders.
The long meal over, he went to his room, feeling it imperative to
be alone. He did not read, he did not write; but, leaving the light
unlit, he wrapped himself up and leaned out upon the broad window-sill
into the great Egyptian night. His deep-sunken thoughts, like to the
crowding stars, stood still, yet for ever took new shapes. He tried
to see behind them, as, when a boy, he had tried to see behind the
constellations--out into space--where there is nothing.
Below him the lights of Helouan twinkled like the Pleiades reflected in
a pool of water; a hum of queer soft noises rose to his ears; but just
beyond the houses the desert stood at attention, the vastest thing he
had ever known, very stern, yet very comforting, with its peace beyond
all comprehension, its delicate, wild terror, and its awful message
of immortality. And the attitude of his mind, though he did not know
it, was one of prayer.... From time to time he went to lie on the bed
with paroxysms of coughing. He had overtaxed his strength--his swiftly
fading strength. The wave had risen to his lips.
Nearer forty than thirty-five, Paul Rivers had come out to Egypt,
plainly understanding that with the greatest care he might last a few
weeks longer than if he stayed in England. A few more times to see the
sunset and the sunrise, to watch the stars, feel the soft airs of earth
upon his cheeks; a few more days of intercourse with his kind, asking
and answering questions, wearing the old familiar clothes he loved,
reading his favourite pages, and then--out into the big spaces--where
there is nothing.
Yet no one, from his stalwart, energetic figure, would have guessed--no
one but the expert mind, not to be deceived, to whom in the first
attack of overwhelming despair and desolation he went for final advice.
He left that house, as many had left it before, knowing that soon he
would need no earthly protection of roof and walls, and that his soul,
if it existed, would be shelterless in the space behind all manifested
life. He had looked forward to fame and position in this world; had,
indeed, already achieved the first step towards this end; and now,
with the vanity of all earthly aims so mercilessly clear before him,
he had turned, in somewhat of a nervous, concentrated hurry, to make
terms with the Infinite while still the brain was there. And had, of
course, found nothing. For it takes a lifetime crowded with experiment
and effort to learn even the alphabet of genuine faith; and what could
come of a few weeks' wild questioning but confusion and bewilderment
of mind? It was inevitable. He came out to Egypt wondering, thinking,
questioning, but chiefly wondering. He had grown, that is, more
childlike, abandoning the futile tool of Reason, which hitherto had
seemed to him the perfect instrument. Its foolishness stood naked
before him in the pitiless light of the specialist's decision.
For--"Who can by searching find out God?"
To be exceedingly careful of over-exertion was the final warning he
brought with him, and, within a few hours of his arrival, three weeks
ago, he had met this girl and utterly disregarded it. He took it
somewhat thus: "Instead of lingering I'll enjoy myself and go out--a
little sooner. I'll _live_. The time is very short." His was not a
nature, anyhow, that could heed a warning. He could not kneel. Upright
and unflinching, he went to meet things as they came, reckless, unwise,
but certainly not afraid. And this characteristic operated now. He ran
to meet Death full tilt in the uncharted spaces that lay behind the
stars. With love for a companion now, he raced, his speed increasing
from day to day, she, as he thought, knowing merely that he sought her,
but had not guessed his darker secret that was now his _lesser_ secret.
And in the desert, this afternoon of the picnic, the great thing he
sped to meet had shown itself with its familiar touch of appalling
cold and shadow, familiar, because all minds know of and accept it;
appalling because, until realised close, and with the mental power at
the full, it remains but a name the heart refuses to believe in. And he
had discovered that its name was--Life.
Rivers had seen the Wave that sweeps incessant, tireless, but as a
rule invisible, round the great curve of the bulging earth, brushing
the nations into the deeps behind. It had followed him home to the
streets and houses of Helouan. He saw it _now_, as he leaned from his
window, dim and immense, too huge to break. Its beauty was nameless,
undecipherable. His coughing echoed back from the wall of its great
sides.... And the music floated up at the same time from the ball-room
in the opposite wing. The two sounds mingled. Life, which is love, and
Death, which is their unchanging partner, held hands beneath the stars.
He leaned out farther to drink in the cool, sweet air. Soon, on this
air, his body would be dust, driven, perhaps, against her very cheek,
trodden on possibly by her little foot--until, in turn, she joined him
too, blown by the same wind loose about the desert. True. Yet at the
same time they would always be together, always somewhere side by side,
continuing in the vast universe, _alive_. This new, absolute conviction
was in him now. He remembered the curious, sweet perfume in the desert,
as of flowers, where yet no flowers are. It was the perfume of life.
But in the desert there is no life. Living things that grow and move
and utter, are but a protest against death. In the desert they are
unnecessary, because death there _is_ not. Its overwhelming vitality
needs no insolent, visible proof, no protest, no challenge, no little
signs of life. The message of the desert is immortality....
He went finally to bed, just before midnight. Hovering magnificently
just outside his window, Death watched him while he slept. The wave
crept to the level of his eyes. He called her name....
* * * * *
And downstairs, meanwhile, the girl, knowing nothing, wondered where he
was, wondered unhappily and restlessly; more--though this she did not
understand--wondered motheringly. Until to-day, on the ride home, and
from their singular conversation together, she had guessed nothing of
his reason for being at Helouan, where so many come in order to find
life. She only knew her own. And she was but twenty-five....
Then, in the desert, when that touch of unearthly chill had stolen out
of the sand towards sunset, she had realised clearly, astonished she
had not seen it long ago, that this man loved her, yet that something
prevented his obeying the great impulse. In the life of Paul Rivers,
whose presence had profoundly stirred her heart the first time she saw
him, there was some obstacle that held him back, a barrier his honour
must respect. He could never tell her of his love. It could lead to
nothing. Knowing that he was not married, her intuition failed her
utterly at first. Then, in their silence on the homeward ride, the
truth had somehow pressed up and touched her with its hand of ice. In
that disjointed conversation at the end, which reads as it sounded, as
though no coherent meaning lay behind the words, and as though both
sought to conceal by speech what yet both burned to utter, she had
divined his darker secret, and knew that it was the same as her own.
She understood then it was Death that had tracked them from the desert,
following with its gigantic shadow from the sandy wastes. The cold,
the darkness, the silence which cannot answer, the stupendous mystery
which is the spell of its inscrutable Presence, had risen about them
in the dusk, and kept them company at a little distance, until the
lights of Helouan had bade it halt. Life which may not, cannot end, had
frightened her.