IX
An hour before sunset Henriot put his rugs and food upon a donkey, andgave the boy directions where to meet him--a considerable distance fromthe appointed spot. He went himself on foot. He slipped in the heatalong 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. Butdesire now was far too strong for caution. The desert tide was rising.It easily swept him down the long white street towards the enormousdeeps beyond. He felt the pull of a thousand miles before him; and twicea thousand years drove at his back.
Everything still basked in the sunshine. He passed Al Hayat, the statelyhotel that dominates the village like a palace built against the sky;and in its pillared colonnades and terraces he saw the throngs of peoplehaving late afternoon tea and listening to the music of a regimentalband. Men in flannels were playing tennis, parties were climbing offdonkeys after long excursions; there was laughter, talking, a babel ofmany voices. The gaiety called to him; the everyday spirit whispered tostay and join the crowd of lively human beings. Soon there would bemerry dinner-parties, dancing, voices of pretty women, sweet whitedresses, singing, and the rest. Soft eyes would question and turn dark.He picked out several girls he knew among the palms. But it was allmany, oh so many leagues away; centuries lay between him and this modernworld. An indescriable loneliness was in his heart. He went searchingthrough the sands of forgotten ages, and wandering among the ruins of avanished time. He hurried. Already the deeper water caught his breath.
He climbed the steep rise towards the plateau where the Observatorystands, and saw two of the officials whom he knew taking a siesta aftertheir long day's work. He felt that his mind, too, had dived andsearched among the heavenly bodies that live in silent, changeless peaceremote from the world of men. They recognised him, these two whose eyesalso knew tremendous distance close. They beckoned, waving the strawsthrough which they sipped their drinks from tall glasses. Their voicesfloated down to him as from the star-fields. He saw the sun gleam uponthe glasses, and heard the clink of the ice against the sides. Thestillness was amazing. He waved an answer, and passed quickly on. Hecould not stop this sliding current of the years.
The tide moved faster, the draw of piled-up cycles urging it. He emergedupon the plateau, and met the cooler Desert air. His feet went crunchingon the "desert-film" that spread its curious dark shiny carpet as far asthe eye could reach; it lay everywhere, unswept and smooth as when thefeet of vanished civilizations trod its burning surface, then dippedbehind the curtains Time pins against the stars. And here the body ofthe tide set all one way. There was a greater strength of current,draught and suction. He felt the powerful undertow. Deeper masses drewhis feet sideways, and he felt the rushing of the central body of thesand. The sands were moving, from their foundation upwards. He wentunresistingly with them.
Turning a moment, he looked back at shining little Helouan in the blazeof evening light. The voices reached him very faintly, merged now in ageneral murmur. Beyond lay the strip of Delta vivid green, the palms,the roofs of Bedrashein, the blue laughter of the Nile with its flocksof curved felucca sails. Further still, rising above the yellow Libyanhorizon, gloomed the vast triangles of a dozen Pyramids, cutting theirwedge-shaped clefts out of a sky fast crimsoning through a sea of gold.Seen thus, their dignity imposed upon the entire landscape. They towereddarkly, symbolic signatures of the ancient Powers that now watched himtaking these little steps across their damaged territory.
He gazed a minute, then went on. He saw the big pale face of the moon inthe east. Above the ever-silent Thing these giant symbols onceinterpreted, she rose, grand, effortless, half-terrible as themselves.And, with her, she lifted up this tide of the Desert that drew his feetacross the sand to Wadi Hof. A moment later he dipped below the ridgethat buried Helouan and Nile and Pyramids from sight. He entered theancient waters. Time then, in an instant, flowed back behind hisfootsteps, obliterating every trace. And with it his mind went too. Hestepped across the gulf of centuries, moving into the Past. The Desertlay before him--an open tomb wherein his soul should read presently ofthings long vanished.
The strange half-lights of sunset began to play their witchery then uponthe landscape. A purple glow came down upon the Mokattam Hills.Perspective danced its tricks of false, incredible deception. Thesoaring kites that were a mile away seemed suddenly close, passing in amoment from the size of gnats to birds with a fabulous stretch of wing.Ridges and cliffs rushed close without a hint of warning, and levelplaces sank into declivities and basins that made him trip and stumble.That indescribable quality of the Desert, which makes timid souls avoidthe hour of dusk, emerged; it spread everywhere, undisguised. And thebewilderment it brings is no vain, imagined thing, for it distortsvision utterly, and the effect upon the mind when familiar sight goesfloundering is the simplest way in the world of dragging the anchor thatgrips reality. At the hour of sunset this bewilderment comes upon a manwith a disconcerting swiftness. It rose now with all this weirdrapidity. Henriot found himself enveloped at a moment's notice.
But, knowing well its effect, he tried to judge it and pass on. Theother matters, the object of his journey chief of all, he refused todwell upon with any imagination. Wisely, his mind, while never losingsight of it, declined to admit the exaggeration that over-elaboratethinking brings. "I'm going to witness an incredible experiment in whichtwo enthusiastic religious dreamers believe firmly," he repeated tohimself. "I have agreed to draw--anything I see. There may be truth init, or they may be merely self-suggested vision due to an artificialexaltation of their minds. I'm interested--perhaps against my betterjudgment. Yet I'll see the adventure out--because I _must_."
This was the attitude he told himself to take. Whether it was the realone, or merely adopted to warm a cooling courage, he could not tell. Theemotions were so complex and warring. His mind, automatically, keptrepeating this comforting formula. Deeper than that he could not see tojudge. For a man who knew the full content of his thought at such a timewould solve some of the oldest psychological problems in the world. Sandhad already buried judgment, and with it all attempt to explain theadventure by the standards acceptable to his brain of to-day. He steeredsubconsciously through a world of dim, huge, half-remembered wonders.
The sun, with that abrupt Egyptian suddenness, was below the horizonnow. The pyramid field had swallowed it. Ra, in his golden boat, saileddistant seas beyond the Libyan wilderness. Henriot walked on and on,aware of utter loneliness. He was walking fields of dream, too remotefrom modern life to recall companionship he once had surely known. Howdim it was, how deep and distant, how lost in this sea of anincalculable Past! He walked into the places that are soundless. Thesoundlessness of ocean, miles below the surface, was about him. He waswith One only--this unfathomable, silent thing where nothing breathes orstirs--nothing but sunshine, shadow and the wind-borne sand. Slowly, infront, the moon climbed up the eastern sky, hanging above thesilence--silence that ran unbroken across the horizons to where Suezgleamed upon the waters of a sister sea in motion. That moon wasglinting now upon the Arabian Mountains by its desolate shores.Southwards stretched the wastes of Upper Egypt a thousand miles to meetthe Nubian wilderness. But over all these separate Deserts stirred thesoft whisper of the moving sand--deep murmuring message that Life was onthe 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 grewapace. Before he had gone the first two miles of his hour's journey, thetwilight caught the rocky hills and twisted them into those monstrousrevelations of physiognomies they barely take the trouble to concealeven in the daytime. And, while he well understood the eroding agenciesthat have produced them, there yet rose in his mind a deeperinterpretation lurking just behind their literal meanings. Here, throughthe motionless surfaces, that nameless thing the Desert ill concealsurged outwards into embryonic form and shape, a
kin, he almost felt, tothose immense deific symbols of Other Life the Egyptians knew andworshipped. Hence, from the Desert, had first come, he felt, theunearthly life they typified in their monstrous figures of granite,evoked in their stately temples, and communed with in the ritual oftheir Mystery ceremonials.
This "watching" aspect of the Libyan Desert is really natural enough;but it is just the natural, Henriot knew, that brings the deepestrevelations. The surface limestones, resisting the erosion, blockthemselves ominously against the sky, while the softer sand beneath setsthem on altared pedestals that define their isolation splendidly. Bluntand unconquerable, these masses now watched him pass between them. TheDesert surface formed them, gave them birth. They rose, they saw, theysank down again--waves upon a sea that carried forgotten life up fromthe depths below. Of forbidding, even menacing type, they somewheremated with genuine grandeur. Unformed, according to any standard ofhuman or of animal faces, they achieved an air of giant physiognomywhich made them terrible. The unwinking stare of eyes--lidless eyes thatyet ever succeed in hiding--looked out under well-marked, leveleyebrows, suggesting a vision that included the motives and purposes ofhis very heart. They looked up grandly, understood why he was there, andthen--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; jowlsdrooping into sandy heaps that climbed against the cheeks; protrudingjaws, and the suggestion of shoulders just about to lift the entirebodies out of the sandy beds--this host of countenances conveyed asolemnity of expression that seemed everlasting, implacable as Death. Ofhuman signature they bore no trace, nor was comparison possible betweentheir kind and any animal life. They peopled the Desert here. And theirsmiles, concealed yet just discernible, went broadening with thedarkness into a Desert laughter. The silence bore it underground. ButHenriot was aware of it. The troop of faces slipped into that single,enormous countenance which is the visage of the Sand. And he saw iteverywhere, yet nowhere.
Thus with the darkness grew his imaginative interpretation of theDesert. Yet there was construction in it, a construction, moreover, thatwas _not_ entirely his own. Powers, he felt, were rising, stirring,wakening from sleep. Behind the natural faces that he saw, these otherthings peered gravely at him as he passed. They used, as it were,materials that lay ready to their hand. Imagination furnished thesehints of outline, yet the Powers themselves were real. There _was_ thisamazing movement of the sand. By no other manner could his mind haveconceived of such a thing, nor dreamed of this simple, yet dreadfulmethod of approach.
Approach! that was the word that first stood out and startled him. Therewas approach; something was drawing nearer. The Desert rose and walkedbeside him. For not alone these ribs of gleaming limestone contributedtowards the elemental visages, but the entire hills, of which they werean outcrop, ran to assist in the formation, and were a necessary part ofthem. He was watched and stared at from behind, in front, on eitherside, and even from below. The sand that swept him on, kept even pacewith him. It turned luminous too, with a patchwork of glimmering effectthat was indescribably weird; lanterns glowed within its substance, andby their light he stumbled on, glad of the Arab boy he would presentlymeet at the appointed place.
The last torch of the sunset had flickered out, melting into thewilderness, when, suddenly opening at his feet, gaped the deep, widegully known as Wadi Hof. Its curve swept past him.
This first impression came upon him with a certain violence: that thedesolate valley rushed. He saw but a section of its curve and sweep, butthrough its entire length of several miles the Wadi fled away. The moonwhitened it like snow, piling black shadows very close against thecliffs. In the flood of moonlight it went rushing past. It was emptyingitself.
For a moment the stream of movement seemed to pause and look up into hisface, then instantly went on again upon its swift career. It was likethe procession of a river to the sea. The valley emptied itself to makeway 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 hehad used before. He said it half aloud. But, while he did so, his heartwhispered quite other things. Thoughts the woman and the man had sownrose up in a flock and fell upon him like a storm of sand. Their impetusdrove off all support of ordinary ideas. They shook him where he stood,staring down into this river of strange invisible movement that washundreds of feet in depth and a quarter of a mile across.
He sought to realise himself as he actually was to-day--mere visitor toHelouan, tempted into this wild adventure with two strangers. But invain. That seemed a dream, unreal, a transient detail picked out fromthe 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 theplay of excited fancy only. By sheer force he pinned his thought againstthis fact: but further he could not get. There _were_ Powers at work;they were being stirred, wakened somewhere into activity. Evocation hadalready begun. That sense of their approach as he had walked along fromHelouan was not imaginary. A descent of some type of life, vanished fromthe world too long for recollection, was on the way,--so vast that itwould 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 atwork, their minds driving beyond this little world. The valley wasemptying itself--for the descent of life their ritual invited.
And the movement in the sand was likewise true. He recalled thesentences the woman had used. "My body," he reflected, "like the bodieslife makes use of everywhere, is mere upright heap of earth and dustand--sand. Here in the Desert is the raw material, the greatest store ofit in the world."
And on the heels of it came sharply that other thing: that thisdescending Life would press into its service all loose matter within itsreach--to form that sphere of action which would be in a literal senseits Body.
In the first few seconds, as he stood there, he realised all this, andrealised it with an overwhelming conviction it was futile to deny. Thefast-emptying valley would later brim with an unaccustomed and terrificlife. Yet Death hid there too--a little, ugly, insignificant death. Withthe name of Vance it flashed upon his mind and vanished, too tiny to bethought about in this torrent of grander messages that shook the depthswithin 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 consciousof a wild desire to run away, to hide, to efface himself utterly, histerror, his curiosity, his little wonder, and not be seen of anything.But it was all vain and foolish. The Desert saw him. The Gigantic knewthat he was there. No escape was possible any longer. Caught by thesand, he stood amid eternal things. The river of movement swept him too.
These hills, now motionless as statues, would presently glide forwardinto the cavalcade, sway like vessels, and go past with the procession.At present only the contents, not the frame, of the Wadi moved. Animmense soft brush of moonlight swept it empty for what was on theway.... But presently the entire Desert would stand up and also go.
Then, making a sideways movement, his feet kicked against something softand yielding that lay heaped upon the Desert floor, and Henriotdiscovered the rugs the Arab boy had carefully set down before he madefull speed for the friendly lights of Helouan. The sound of hisdeparting 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 makepreparations for the night. But the appointed spot, whence he was towatch, lay upon the summit of the opposite cliffs. He must cross theWadi bed and climb. Slowly and with labour he made his way down a steepcleft into the depth of the Wadi Hof, sliding and stumbling often, tillat length he stood upon the floor of shining moonlight. It was verysmooth; windless utterly; still as space; each particle of sand lay inits ancient pla
ce asleep. The movement, it seemed, had ceased.
He clambered next up the eastern side, through pitch-black shadows, andwithin the hour reached the ledge upon the top whence he could see belowhim, like a silvered map, the sweep of the valley bed. The wind nippedkeenly here again, coming over the leagues of cooling sand. Looseboulders of splintered rock, started by his climbing, crashed and boomedinto the depths. He banked the rugs behind him, wrapped himself in hisovercoat, and lay down to wait. Behind him was a two-foot crumbling wallagainst which he leaned; in front a drop of several hundred feet throughspace. He lay upon a platform, therefore, invisible from the Desert athis back. Below, the curving Wadi formed a natural amphitheatre in whicheach separate boulder fallen from the cliffs, and even the little_silla_ shrubs the camels eat, were plainly visible. He noted all thebigger ones among them. He counted them over half aloud.
And the moving stream he had been unaware of when crossing the beditself, now began again. The Wadi went rushing past before the broom ofmoonlight. Again, the enormous and the tiny combined in one singlestrange impression. For, through this conception of great movement,stirred also a roving, delicate touch that his imagination felt asbird-like. Behind the solid mass of the Desert's immobility flashedsomething swift and light and airy. Bizarre pictures interpreted it tohim, like rapid snap-shots of a huge flying panorama: he thought ofdarting dragon-flies seen at Helouan, of children's little dancing feet,of twinkling butterflies--of birds. Chiefly, yes, of a flock of birds inflight, whose separate units formed a single entity. The idea of theGroup-Soul possessed his mind once more. But it came with a sense ofmore than curiosity or wonder. Veneration lay behind it, a venerationtouched with awe. It rose in his deepest thought that here was the firsthint 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 toobig to mate with definite dread. There was high anticipation in him, butnot anxiety. Of himself, as Felix Henriot, indeed, he hardly seemedaware. He was some one else. Or, rather, he was himself at a stage hehad known once far, far away in a remote pre-existence. He watchedhimself from dim summits of a Past, of which no further details were asyet recoverable.
Pencil and sketching-block lay ready to his hand. The moon rose higher,tucking the shadows ever more closely against the precipices. The silverpassed into a sheet of snowy whiteness, that made every boulder clearlyvisible. Solemnity deepened everywhere into awe. The Wadi fled silentlydown the stream of hours. It was almost empty now. And then, abruptly,he was aware of change. The motion altered somewhere. It moved morequietly; pace slackened; the end of the procession that evacuated thedepth 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 watcheda regiment of soldiers filing by. The wind took off his voice like aflying feather of sound.
And there _was_ a change. It had begun. Night and the moon stood stillto watch and listen. The wind dropped utterly away. The sand ceased itsshifting movement. The Desert everywhere stopped still, and turned.
Some curtain, then, that for centuries had veiled the world, drewsoftly up, leaving a shaded vista down which the eyes of his soul peeredtowards long-forgotten pictures. Still buried by the sands too deep forfull recovery, he yet perceived dim portions of them--things oncehonoured and loved passionately. For once they had surely been to himthe whole of life, not merely a fragment for cheap wonder to inspect.And they were curiously familiar, even as the person of this woman whonow evoked them was familiar. Henriot made no pretence to more definiteremembrance; but the haunting certainty rushed over him, deeper thandoubt or denial, and with such force that he felt no effort to destroyit. Some lost sweetness of spiritual ambitions, lived for with thispassionate devotion, and passionately worshipped as men to-day worshipfame and money, revived in him with a tempest of high glory. Centres ofmemory stirred from an age-long sleep, so that he could have wept attheir so complete obliteration hitherto. That such majesty had departedfrom the world as though it never had existed, was a thought fordesolation and for tears. And though the little fragment he was about towitness might be crude in itself and incomplete, yet it was part of avast system that once explored the richest realms of deity. Thereverence in him contained a holiness of the night and of the stars;great, gentle awe lay in it too; for he stood, aflame with anticipationand humility, at the gateway of sacred things.
And this was the mood, no thrill of cheap excitement or alarm to weakenin, in which he first became aware that two spots of darkness he hadtaken all along for boulders on the snowy valley bed, were actuallysomething very different. They were living figures. They moved. It wasnot the shadows slowly following the moonlight, but the stir of humanbeings who all these hours had been motionless as stone. He must havepassed 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 onthem without recognition. Their minds, he knew full well, had not beeninactive 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 principalfigures. It had nothing in common with the cheap external ceremonial ofmodern days. In forgotten powers of the soul its grandeur lay, potent,splendid, true. Long before he came, perhaps all through the day, thesetwo had laboured with their arduous preparations. They were there, partof the Desert, when hours ago he had crossed the plateau in thetwilight. To them--to this woman's potent working of old ceremonial--hadbeen due that singular rush of imagination he had felt. He hadinterpreted the Desert as alive. Here was the explanation. It _was_alive. Life was on the way. Long latent, her intense desire summoned itback to physical expression; and the effect upon him had steadilyincreased as he drew nearer to the centre where she would focus itsrevival and return. Those singular impressions of being watched andaccompanied were explained. A priest of this old-world worship performeda genuine evocation; a Great One of Vision revived the cosmic Powers.
Henriot watched the small figures far below him with a sense of dramaticsplendour that only this association of far-off Memory could accountfor. It was their rising now, and the lifting of their arms to form aslow revolving outline, that marked the abrupt cessation of the largerriver of movement; for the sweeping of the Wadi sank into suddenstillness, and these two, with motions not unlike some dance ofdeliberate solemnity, passed slowly through the moonlight to and fro.His attention fixed upon them both. All other movement ceased. Theyfastened the flow of Time against the Desert's body.
What happened then? How could his mind interpret an experience so longdenied that the power of expression, as of comprehension, has ceased toexist? How translate this symbolical representation, small detail thoughit was, of a transcendent worship entombed for most so utterly beyondrecovery? Its splendour could never lodge in minds that conceive Deityperched upon a cloud within telephoning distance of fashionablechurches. How should he phrase it even to himself, whose memory drew uppictures from so dim a past that the language fit to frame them layunreachable and lost?
Henriot did not know. Perhaps he never yet has known. Certainly, at thetime, he did not even try to think. His sensations remain hisown--untranslatable; and even that instinctive description the mindgropes for automatically, floundered, halted, and stopped dead. Yetthere rose within him somewhere, from depths long drowned in slumber, areviving power by which he saw, divined and recollected--rememberedseemed too literal a word--these elements of a worship he once hadpersonally known. He, too, had worshipped thus. His soul had moved amidsimilar evocations in some aeonian past, whence now the sand was beingcleared away. Symbols of stupendous meaning flashed and went their wayacross the lifting mists. He hardly caught their meaning, so long it wassince, he had known them; yet they were famil
iar as the faces seen indreams, and some hint of their spiritual significance left faint tracesin his heart by means of which their grandeur reached towardsinterpretation. And all were symbols of a cosmic, deific nature; ofPowers that only symbols can express--prayer-books and sacraments usedin the Wisdom Religion of an older time, but to-day known only in thedecrepit, literal shell which is their degradation.
Grandly the figures moved across the valley bed. The powers of theheavenly bodies once more joined them. They moved to the measure of acosmic dance, whose rhythm was creative. The Universe partnered them.
There was this transfiguration of all common, external things. Herealised that appearances were visible letters of a soundless language,a language he once had known. The powers of night and moon and desertsand married with points in the fluid stream of his inmost spiritualbeing that knew and welcomed them. He understood.
Old Egypt herself stooped down from her uncovered throne. The stars sentmessengers. There was commotion in the secret, sandy places of thedesert. 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 ruinquestioned by alien hearts that knew not their spiritual meaning. Buthere the entire Desert swept in to form a shrine, and the Majesty thatonce 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 thevast recesses of the ceiling, and the wind from a thousand miles broughtin the perfume of her incense. For with that faith which shiftsmountains from their sandy bed, two passionate, believing souls invokedthe Ka of Egypt.
And the motions that they made, he saw, were definite harmoniouspatterns their dark figures traced upon the shining valley floor. Likethe points of compasses, with stems invisible, and directed from thesky, their movements marked the outlines of great signatures ofpower--the sigils of the type of life they would evoke. It would come asa Procession. No individual outline could contain it. It needed for itsvisible expression--many. The descent of a group-soul, known to theworship of this mighty system, rose from its lair of centuries and movedhugely down upon them. The Ka, answering to the summons, would mate withsand. The Desert was its Body.
Yet it was not this that he had come to fix with block and pencil. Notyet 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 andprolonged to remember with accuracy later, he understood that they wereforms of that root-geometry which lies behind all manifested life. Themould was being traced in outline. Life would presently inform it. And asinging rose from the maze of lines whose beauty was like the beauty ofthe constellations.
This sound was very faint at first, but grew steadily in volume.Although no echoes, properly speaking, were possible, these precipicescaught stray notes that trooped in from the further sandy reaches. Thefigures certainly were chanting, but their chanting was not all heheard. Other sounds came to his ears from far away, running past himthrough the air from every side, and from incredible distances, allflocking down into the Wadi bed to join the parent note that summonedthem. The Desert was giving voice. And memory, lifting her hood yethigher, showed more of her grey, mysterious face that searched his soulwith questions. Had he so soon forgotten that strange union of form andsound which once was known to the evocative rituals of olden days?
Henriot tried patiently to disentangle this desert-music that theirintoning 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 wasreverberation, rhythm, measure; there was almost the breaking of thestream into great syllables. But was it due, this strange reverberation,to the countless particles of sand meeting in mid-air about him, or--tolarger bodies, whose surfaces caught this friction of the sand and threwit back against his ears? The wind, now rising, brought particles thatstung his face and hands, and filled his eyes with a minute fine dustthat 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 morein a single, whirling torrent. But Henriot sought no commonplaceexplanation of what he witnessed; and here was the proof that allhappened in some vestibule of inner experience where the strain ofquestion and answer had no business. One sitting beside him need nothave seen anything at all. His host, for instance, from Helouan, neednot have been aware. Night screened it; Helouan, as the whole of modernexperience, stood in front of the screen. This thing took place behindit. He crouched motionless, watching in some reconstructed ante-chamberof the soul's pre-existence, while the torrent grew into a veritabletempest.
Yet Night remained unshaken; the veil of moonlight did not quiver; thestars dropped their slender golden pillars unobstructed. Calmnessreigned everywhere as before. The stupendous representation passed onbehind it all.
But the dignity of the little human movements that he watched had becomenow indescribable. The gestures of the arms and bodies investedthemselves with consummate grandeur, as these two strode into thecaverns behind manifested life and drew forth symbols that representedvanished Powers. The sound of their chanting voices broke in cadencedfragments against the shores of language. The words Henriot neveractually caught, if words they were; yet he understood theirpurport--these Names of Power to which the type of returning life gaveanswer as they approached. He remembered fumbling for his drawingmaterials, with such violence, however, that the pencil snapped in twobetween his fingers as he touched it. For now, even here, upon the outerfringe of the ceremonial ground, there was a stir of forces that set thevery muscles working in him before he had become aware of it....
Then came the moment when his heart leaped against his ribs with asudden violence that was almost pain, standing a second later still asdeath. The lines upon the valley floor ceased their maze-like dance. Allmovement stopped. Sound died away. In the midst of this profound anddreadful silence the sigils lay empty there below him. They waited to bein-formed. For the moment of entrance had come at last. Life was close.
And he understood why this return of life had all along suggested aProcession and could be no mere momentary flash of vision. From suchappalling distance did it sweep down towards the present.
Upon this network, then, of splendid lines, at length held rigid, theentire Desert reared itself with walls of curtained sand, that dwarfedthe cliffs, the shouldering hills, the very sky. The Desert stood onend. As once before he had dreamed it from his balcony windows, it roseupright, towering, and close against his face. It built sudden rampartsto the stars that chambered the thing he witnessed behind walls nocenturies 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 eyesinto the vast picture-gallery Memory threw abruptly open. And thepicture spaced its noble outline thus against the very stars. He gazedbetween columns, that supported the sky itself, like pillars of sandthat swept across the field of vanished years. Sand poured and streamedaside, laying bare the Past.
For down the enormous vista into which he gazed, as into an avenuerunning a million miles towards a tiny point, he saw this moving Thingthat came towards him, shaking loose the countless veils of sand theages 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. Shecame. She stretched forth an arm towards the worshippers who evoked her.Out of the Desert, out of the leagues of sand, out of the immeasurablewilderness which was her mummied Form and Body, she rose and came. Andthis fragment of her he would actually see--this little portion that wasobedient to the stammered and broken ceremonial. The partial revelationhe would witness--yet so vast, even this little bit of it, that it cameas a Procession and a host.
For a moment there was nothing. And then the voice of the woma
n rose ina resounding cry that filled the Wadi to its furthest precipices, beforeit died away again to silence. That a human voice could produce suchvolume, accent, depth, seemed half incredible. The walls of toweringsand swallowed it instantly. But the Procession of life, needing agroup, a host, an army for its physical expression, reached at thatmoment the nearer end of the huge avenue. It touched the Present; itentered the world of men.