But all night long it watched and waited, rising to peer above the
little balcony, and sometimes entering the room and piling up beside his
very pillow. He dreamed of Sand. III


For some days Henriot saw little of the man who came from Birmingham and
pushed curiosity to a climax by asking for a compass in the middle of
the night. For one thing, he was a good deal with his friends upon the
other side of Helouan, and for another, he slept several nights in the
Desert. He loved the gigantic peace the Desert gave him. The world was forgotten
there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it. Everything faded
out. The soul turned inwards upon itself. An Arab boy and donkey took out sleeping-bag, food and water to the Wadi
Hof, a desolate gorge about an hour eastwards. It winds between cliffs
whose summits rise some thousand feet above the sea. It opens suddenly,
cut deep into the swaying world of level plateaux and undulating hills. It moves about too; he never found it in the same place twice--like an
arm of the Desert that shifted with the changing lights. Here he watched
dawns and sunsets, slept through the mid-day heat, and enjoyed the
unearthly colouring that swept Day and Night across the huge horizons. In solitude the Desert soaked down into him. At night the jackals cried
in the darkness round his cautiously-fed camp fire--small, because wood
had to be carried--and in the day-time kites circled overhead to inspect
him, and an occasional white vulture flapped across the blue. The weird
desolation of this rocky valley, he thought, was like the scenery of the
moon. He took no watch with him, and the arrival of the donkey boy an
hour after sunrise came almost from another planet, bringing things of
time and common life out of some distant gulf where they had lain
forgotten among lost ages. The short hour of twilight brought, too, a bewitchment into the silence
that was a little less than comfortable. Full light or darkness he could
manage, but this time of half things made him want to shut his eyes and
hide. Its effect stepped over imagination. The mind got lost. He could
not understand it. For the cliffs and boulders of discoloured limestone
shone then with an inward glow that signalled to the Desert with veiled
lanterns. The misshappen hills, carved by wind and rain into ominous
outlines, stirred and nodded. In the morning light they retired into
themselves, asleep. But at dusk the tide retreated. They rose from the
sea, emerging naked, threatening. They ran together and joined
shoulders, the entire army of them. And the glow of their sandy bodies,
self-luminous, continued even beneath the stars. Only the moonlight
drowned it. For the moonrise over the Mokattam Hills brought a white,
grand loveliness that drenched the entire Desert. It drew a marvellous
sweetness from the sand. It shone across a world as yet unfinished,
whereon no life might show itself for ages yet to come. He was alone
then upon an empty star, before the creation of things that breathed and
moved. What impressed him, however, more than everything else was the enormous
vitality that rose out of all this apparent death. There was no hint of
the melancholy that belongs commonly to flatness; the sadness of wide,
monotonous landscape was not here. The endless repetition of sweeping
vale and plateau brought infinity within measurable comprehension. He
grasped a definite meaning in the phrase "world without end": the
Desert had no end and no beginning. It gave him a sense of eternal
peace, the silent peace that star-fields know. Instead of subduing the
soul with bewilderment, it inspired with courage, confidence, hope. Through this sand which was the wreck of countless geological ages,
rushed life that was terrific and uplifting, too huge to include
melancholy, too deep to betray itself in movement. Here was the
stillness of eternity. Behind the spread grey masque of apparent death
lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point. In
the Desert he felt himself absolutely royal. And this contrast of Life, veiling itself in Death, was a contradiction
that somehow intoxicated. The Desert exhilaration never left him. He was
never alone. A companionship of millions went with him, and he _felt_
the Desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains of sand. It was the Khamasin, the hot wind bringing sand, that drove him in--with
the feeling that these few days and nights had been immeasurable, and
that he had been away a thousand years. He came back with the magic of
the Desert in his blood, hotel-life tasteless and insipid by comparison. To human impressions thus he was fresh and vividly sensitive. His being,
cleaned and sensitized by pure grandeur, "felt" people--for a time at
any rate--with an uncommon sharpness of receptive judgment. He returned
to a life somehow mean and meagre, resuming insignificance with his
dinner jacket. Out with the sand he had been regal; now, like a slave,
he strutted self-conscious and reduced. But this imperial standard of the Desert stayed a little time beside
him, its purity focussing judgment like a lens. The specks of smaller
emotions left it clear at first, and as his eye wandered vaguely over
the people assembled in the dining-room, it was arrested with a vivid
shock upon two figures at the little table facing him. He had forgotten Vance, the Birmingham man who sought the North at
midnight with a pocket compass. He now saw him again, with an intuitive
discernment entirely fresh. Before memory brought up her clouding
associations, some brilliance flashed a light upon him. "That man,"
Henriot thought, "might have come with me. He would have understood and
loved it!" But the thought was really this--a moment's reflection spread
it, rather: "He belongs somewhere to the Desert; the Desert brought him
out here." And, again, hidden swiftly behind it like a movement running
below water--"What does he want with it? What is the deeper motive he
conceals? For there is a deeper motive; and it _is_ concealed." But it was the woman seated next him who absorbed his attention really,
even while this thought flashed and went its way. The empty chair was
occupied at last. Unlike his first encounter with the man, she looked
straight at him. Their eyes met fully. For several seconds there was
steady mutual inspection, while her penetrating stare, intent without
being rude, passed searchingly all over his face. It was disconcerting. Crumbling his bread, he looked equally hard at her, unable to turn away,
determined not to be the first to shift his gaze. And when at length she
lowered her eyes he felt that many things had happened, as in a long
period of intimate conversation. Her mind had judged him through and
through. Questions and answer flashed. They were no longer strangers. For the rest of dinner, though he was careful to avoid direct
inspection, he was aware that she felt his presence and was secretly
speaking with him. She asked questions beneath her breath.