For a moment the stream of movement seemed to pause and look up into his
face, then instantly went on again upon its swift career. It was like
the procession of a river to the sea. The valley emptied itself to make
way 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 he
had used before. He said it half aloud. But, while he did so, his heart
whispered quite other things. Thoughts the woman and the man had sown
rose up in a flock and fell upon him like a storm of sand. Their impetus
drove off all support of ordinary ideas. They shook him where he stood,
staring down into this river of strange invisible movement that was
hundreds of feet in depth and a quarter of a mile across. He sought to realise himself as he actually was to-day--mere visitor to
Helouan, tempted into this wild adventure with two strangers. But in
vain. That seemed a dream, unreal, a transient detail picked out from
the 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 the
play of excited fancy only. By sheer force he pinned his thought against
this fact: but further he could not get. There _were_ Powers at work;
they were being stirred, wakened somewhere into activity. Evocation had
already begun. That sense of their approach as he had walked along from
Helouan was not imaginary. A descent of some type of life, vanished from
the world too long for recollection, was on the way,--so vast that it
would 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 at
work, their minds driving beyond this little world. The valley was
emptying itself--for the descent of life their ritual invited. And the movement in the sand was likewise true. He recalled the
sentences the woman had used. "My body," he reflected, "like the bodies
life makes use of everywhere, is mere upright heap of earth and dust
and--sand. Here in the Desert is the raw material, the greatest store of
it in the world." And on the heels of it came sharply that other thing: that this
descending Life would press into its service all loose matter within its
reach--to form that sphere of action which would be in a literal sense
its Body. In the first few seconds, as he stood there, he realised all this, and
realised it with an overwhelming conviction it was futile to deny. The
fast-emptying valley would later brim with an unaccustomed and terrific
life. Yet Death hid there too--a little, ugly, insignificant death. With
the name of Vance it flashed upon his mind and vanished, too tiny to be
thought about in this torrent of grander messages that shook the depths
within 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 conscious
of a wild desire to run away, to hide, to efface himself utterly, his
terror, his curiosity, his little wonder, and not be seen of anything. But it was all vain and foolish. The Desert saw him. The Gigantic knew
that he was there. No escape was possible any longer. Caught by the
sand, he stood amid eternal things. The river of movement swept him too. These hills, now motionless as statues, would presently glide forward
into the cavalcade, sway like vessels, and go past with the procession. At present only the contents, not the frame, of the Wadi moved. An
immense soft brush of moonlight swept it empty for what was on the
way.... But presently the entire Desert would stand up and also go. Then, making a sideways movement, his feet kicked against something soft
and yielding that lay heaped upon the Desert floor, and Henriot
discovered the rugs the Arab boy had carefully set down before he made
full speed for the friendly lights of Helouan. The sound of his
departing 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 make
preparations for the night. But the appointed spot, whence he was to
watch, lay upon the summit of the opposite cliffs. He must cross the
Wadi bed and climb. Slowly and with labour he made his way down a steep
cleft into the depth of the Wadi Hof, sliding and stumbling often, till
at length he stood upon the floor of shining moonlight. It was very
smooth; windless utterly; still as space; each particle of sand lay in
its ancient place asleep. The movement, it seemed, had ceased. He clambered next up the eastern side, through pitch-black shadows, and
within the hour reached the ledge upon the top whence he could see below
him, like a silvered map, the sweep of the valley bed. The wind nipped
keenly here again, coming over the leagues of cooling sand. Loose
boulders of splintered rock, started by his climbing, crashed and boomed
into the depths. He banked the rugs behind him, wrapped himself in his
overcoat, and lay down to wait. Behind him was a two-foot crumbling wall
against which he leaned; in front a drop of several hundred feet through
space. He lay upon a platform, therefore, invisible from the Desert at
his back. Below, the curving Wadi formed a natural amphitheatre in which
each separate boulder fallen from the cliffs, and even the little
_silla_ shrubs the camels eat, were plainly visible. He noted all the
bigger ones among them. He counted them over half aloud. And the moving stream he had been unaware of when crossing the bed
itself, now began again. The Wadi went rushing past before the broom of
moonlight. Again, the enormous and the tiny combined in one single
strange impression. For, through this conception of great movement,
stirred also a roving, delicate touch that his imagination felt as
bird-like. Behind the solid mass of the Desert's immobility flashed
something swift and light and airy. Bizarre pictures interpreted it to
him, like rapid snap-shots of a huge flying panorama: he thought of
darting dragon-flies seen at Helouan, of children's little dancing feet,
of twinkling butterflies--of birds. Chiefly, yes, of a flock of birds in
flight, whose separate units formed a single entity. The idea of the
Group-Soul possessed his mind once more. But it came with a sense of
more than curiosity or wonder. Veneration lay behind it, a veneration
touched with awe. It rose in his deepest thought that here was the first
hint 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 too
big to mate with definite dread. There was high anticipation in him, but
not anxiety.