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 Libyan 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 Libyan 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.