The
soft-footed Arab servants moved across the hall in their white sheets
like eddies of dust the wind stirred from the Libyan dunes. And over
these two strangers close beside him stole a queer, indefinite
alteration. Moods and emotions, nameless as unknown stars, rose through
his soul, trailing dark mists of memory from unfathomable distances. Lady Statham answered him indirectly. He found himself wishing that
those steady eyes would sometimes close. "Love is known only by feeling it," she said, her voice deepening a
little. "Behind the form you feel the person loved. The process is an
evocation, pure and simple. An arduous ceremonial, involving worship and
devotional preparation, is the means. It is a difficult ritual--the
only one acknowledged by the world as still effectual. Ritual is the
passage way of the soul into the Infinite." He might have said the words himself. The thought lay in him while she
uttered it. Evocation everywhere in life was as true as assimilation. Nevertheless, he stared his companion full in the eyes with a touch of
almost rude amazement. But no further questions prompted themselves; or,
rather, he declined to ask them. He recalled, somehow uneasily, that in
ceremonial the points of the compass have significance, standing for
forces and activities that sleep there until invoked, and a passing
light fell upon that curious midnight request in the corridor upstairs. These two were on the track of undesirable experiments, he thought.... They wished to include him too. "You go at night sometimes into the Desert?" he heard himself saying. It
was impulsive and miscalculated. His feeling that it would be wise to
change the conversation resulted in giving it fresh impetus instead. "We saw you there--in the Wadi Hof," put in Vance, suddenly breaking his
long silence; "you too sleep out, then? It means, you know, the Valley
of Fear." "We wondered--" It was Lady Statham's voice, and she leaned forward
eagerly as she said it, then abruptly left the sentence incomplete. Henriot started; a sense of momentary acute discomfort again ran over
him. The same second she continued, though obviously changing the
phrase--"we wondered how you spent your day there, during the heat. But
you paint, don't you? You draw, I mean?" The commonplace question, he realised in every fibre of his being, meant
something _they_ deemed significant. Was it his talent for drawing that
they sought to use him for? Even as he answered with a simple
affirmative, he had a flash of intuition that might be fanciful, yet
that might be true: that this extraordinary pair were intent upon some
ceremony of evocation that should summon into actual physical expression
some Power--some type of life--known long ago to ancient worship, and
that they even sought to fix its bodily outline with the pencil--his
pencil. A gateway of incredible adventure opened at his feet. He balanced on the
edge of knowing unutterable things. Here was a clue that might lead him
towards the hidden Egypt he had ever craved to know. An awful hand was
beckoning. The sands were shifting. He saw the million eyes of the
Desert watching him from beneath the level lids of centuries. Speck by
speck, and grain by grain, the sand that smothered memory lifted the
countless wrappings that embalmed it. And he was willing, yet afraid. Why in the world did he hesitate and
shrink? Why was it that the presence of this silent, watching
personality in the chair beside him kept caution still alive, with
warning close behind? The pictures in his mind were gorgeously coloured. It was Richard Vance who somehow streaked them through with black. A
thing of darkness, born of this man's unassertive presence, flitted ever
across the scenery, marring its grandeur with something evil, petty,
dreadful. He held a horrible thought alive. His mind was thinking venal
purposes. In Henriot himself imagination had grown curiously heated, fed by what
had been suggested rather than actually said. Ideas of immensity crowded
his brain, yet never assumed definite shape. They were familiar, even as
this strange woman was familiar. Once, long ago, he had known them well;
had even practised them beneath these bright Egyptian stars. Whence came
this prodigious glad excitement in his heart, this sense of mighty
Powers coaxed down to influence the very details of daily life? Behind
them, for all their vagueness, lay an archetypal splendour, fraught with
forgotten meanings. He had always been aware of it in this mysterious
land, but it had ever hitherto eluded him. It hovered everywhere. He had
felt it brooding behind the towering Colossi at Thebes, in the skeletons
of wasted temples, in the uncouth comeliness of the Sphinx, and in the
crude terror of the Pyramids even. Over the whole of Egypt hung its
invisible wings. These were but isolated fragments of the Body that
might express it. And the Desert remained its cleanest, truest symbol. Sand knew it closest. Sand might even give it bodily form and outline. But, while it escaped description in his mind, as equally it eluded
visualisation in his soul, he felt that it combined with its vastness
something infinitely small as well. Of such wee particles is the giant
Desert born....

Henriot started nervously in his chair, convicted once more of
unconscionable staring; and at the same moment a group of hotel people,
returning from a dance, passed through the hall and nodded him
good-night. The scent of the women reached him; and with it the sound of
their voices discussing personalities just left behind. A London
atmosphere came with them. He caught trivial phrases, uttered in a
drawling tone, and followed by the shrill laughter of a girl. They
passed upstairs, discussing their little things, like marionettes upon a
tiny stage. But their passage brought him back to things of modern life, and to some
standard of familiar measurement. The pictures that his soul had gazed
at so deep within, he realised, were a pictorial transfer caught
incompletely from this woman's vivid mind. He had seen the Desert as the
grey, enormous Tomb where hovered still the Ka of ancient Egypt. Sand
screened her visage with the veil of centuries. But She was there, and
She was living. Egypt herself had pitched a temporary camp in him, and
then moved on. There was a momentary break, a sense of abruptness and dislocation. And
then he became aware that Lady Statham had been speaking for some time
before he caught her actual words, and that a certain change had come
into her voice as also into her manner. V


She was leaning closer to him, her face suddenly glowing and alive. Through the stone figure coursed the fires of a passion that deepened
the coal-black eyes and communicated a hint of light--of exaltation--to
her whole person. It was incredibly moving. To this deep passion was due
the power he had felt. It was her entire life; she lived for it, she
would die for it. Her calmness of manner enhanced its effect.