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 maze-like 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
in-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 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.