It built sudden ramparts
to the stars that chambered the thing he witnessed behind walls no
centuries could ever bring down crumbling into dust. He himself, in some curious fashion, lay just outside, viewing it apart. As from a pinnacle, he peered within--peered down with straining eyes
into the vast picture-gallery Memory threw abruptly open. And the
picture spaced its noble outline thus against the very stars. He gazed
between columns, that supported the sky itself, like pillars of sand
that swept across the field of vanished years. Sand poured and streamed
aside, laying bare the Past. For down the enormous vista into which he gazed, as into an avenue
running a million miles towards a tiny point, he saw this moving Thing
that came towards him, shaking loose the countless veils of sand the
ages had swathed about it. The Ka of buried Egypt wakened out of sleep. She had heard the potent summons of her old, time-honoured ritual. She
came. She stretched forth an arm towards the worshippers who evoked her. Out of the Desert, out of the leagues of sand, out of the immeasurable
wilderness which was her mummied Form and Body, she rose and came. And
this fragment of her he would actually see--this little portion that was
obedient to the stammered and broken ceremonial. The partial revelation
he would witness--yet so vast, even this little bit of it, that it came
as a Procession and a host. For a moment there was nothing. And then the voice of the woman rose in
a resounding cry that filled the Wadi to its furthest precipices, before
it died away again to silence. That a human voice could produce such
volume, accent, depth, seemed half incredible. The walls of towering
sand swallowed it instantly. But the Procession of life, needing a
group, a host, an army for its physical expression, reached at that
moment the nearer end of the huge avenue. It touched the Present; it
entered the world of men. X


The entire range of Henriot's experience, read, imagined, dreamed, then
fainted into unreality before the sheer wonder of what he saw. In the
brief interval it takes to snap the fingers the climax was thus so
hurriedly upon him. And, through it all, he was clearly aware of the
pair of little human figures, man and woman, standing erect and
commanding at the centre--knew, too, that she directed and controlled,
while he in some secondary fashion supported her--and ever watched. But
both were dim, dropped somewhere into a lesser scale. It was the
knowledge of their presence, however, that alone enabled him to keep his
powers in hand at all. But for these two _human_ beings there within
possible reach, he must have closed his eyes and swooned. For a tempest that seemed to toss loose stars about the sky swept round
about him, pouring up the pillared avenue in front of the procession. A
blast of giant energy, of liberty, came through. Forwards and backwards,
circling spirally about him like a whirlwind, came this revival of Life
that sought to dip itself once more in matter and in form. It came to
the accurate out-line of its form they had traced for it. He held his
mind steady enough to realise that it was akin to what men call a
"descent" of some "spiritual movement" that wakens a body of believers
into faith--a race, an entire nation; only that he experienced it in
this brief, concentrated form before it has scattered down into ten
thousand hearts. Here he knew its source and essence, behind the veil. Crudely, unmanageable as yet, he felt it, rushing loose behind
appearances. There was this amazing impact of a twisting, swinging force
that stormed down as though it would bend and coil the very ribs of the
old stubborn hills. It sought to warm them with the stress of its own
irresistible life-stream, to beat them into shape, and make pliable
their obstinate resistance. Through all things the impulse poured and
spread, like fire at white heat. Yet nothing visible came as yet, no alteration in the actual landscape,
no sign of change in things familiar to his eyes, while impetus thus
fought against inertia. He perceived nothing form-al. Calm and untouched
himself, he lay outside the circle of evocation, watching, waiting,
scarcely daring to breathe, yet well aware that any minute the scene
would transfer itself from memory that was subjective to matter that was
objective. And then, in a flash, the bridge was built, and the transfer was
accomplished. How or where he did not see, he could not tell. It was
there before he knew it--there before his normal, earthly sight. He saw
it, as he saw the hands he was holding stupidly up to shield his face. For this terrific release of force long held back, long stored up,
latent for centuries, came pouring down the empty Wadi bed prepared for
its reception. Through stones and sand and boulders it came in an
impetuous hurricane of power. The liberation of its life appalled him. All that was free, untied, responded instantly like chaff; loose objects
fled towards it; there was a yielding in the hills and precipices; and
even in the mass of Desert which provided their foundation. The hinges
of the Sand went creaking in the night. It shaped for itself a bodily
outline. Yet, most strangely, nothing definitely moved. How could he express the
violent contradiction? For the immobility was apparent only--a sham, a
counterfeit; while behind it the essential _being_ of these things did
rush and shift and alter. He saw the two things side by side: the outer
immobility the senses commonly agree upon, _and_ this amazing flying-out
of their inner, invisible substance towards the vortex of attracting
life that sucked them in. For stubborn matter turned docile before the
stress of this returning life, taught somewhere to be plastic. It was
being moulded into an approach to bodily outline. A mobile elasticity
invaded rigid substance. The two officiating human beings, safe at the
stationary centre, and himself, just outside the circle of operation,
alone remained untouched and unaffected. But a few feet in any
direction, for any one of them, meant--instantaneous death. They would
be absorbed into the vortex, mere corpuscles pressed into the service of
this sphere of action of a mighty Body....

How these perceptions reached him with such conviction, Henriot could
never say. He knew it, because he _felt_ it. Something fell about him
from the sky that already paled towards the dawn. The stars themselves,
it seemed, contributed some part of the terrific, flowing impulse that
conquered matter and shaped itself this physical expression. Then, before he was able to fashion any preconceived idea of what
visible form this potent life might assume, he was aware of further
change. It came at the briefest possible interval after the
beginning--this certainty that, to and fro about him, as yet however
indeterminate, passed Magnitudes that were stupendous as the desert. There was beauty in them too, though a terrible beauty hardly of this
earth at all.