Even in thought it appalled him. *       *       *       *       *

He undressed hurriedly, almost with the child's idea of finding safety
between the sheets. His mind undressed itself as well. The business of
the day laid itself automatically aside; the will sank down; desire grew
inactive. Henriot was exhausted. But, in that stage towards slumber when
thinking stops, and only fugitive pictures pass across the mind in
shadowy dance, his brain ceased shouting its mechanical explanations,
and his soul unveiled a peering eye. Great limbs of memory, smothered by
the activities of the Present, stirred their stiffened lengths through
the sands of long ago--sands this woman had begun to excavate from some
far-off pre-existence they had surely known together. Vagueness and
certainty ran hand in hand. Details were unrecoverable, but the emotions
in which they were embedded moved. He turned restlessly in his bed, striving to seize the amazing clues and
follow them. But deliberate effort hid them instantly again; they
retired instantly into the subconsciousness. With the brain of this body
he now occupied they had nothing to do. The brain stored memories of
each life only. This ancient script was graven in his soul. Subconsciousness alone could interpret and reveal. And it was his
subconscious memory that Lady Statham had been so busily excavating. Dimly it stirred and moved about the depths within him, never clearly
seen, indefinite, felt as a yearning after unrecoverable knowledge. Against the darker background of Vance's fear and sinister purpose--both
of this present life, and recent--he saw the grandeur of this woman's
impossible dream, and _knew_, beyond argument or reason, that it was
true. Judgment and will asleep, he left the impossibility aside, and
took the grandeur. The Belief of Lady Statham was not credulity and
superstition; it was Memory. Still to this day, over the sands of Egypt,
hovered immense spiritual potencies, so vast that they could only know
physical expression in a group--in many. Their sphere of bodily
manifestation must be a host, each individual unit in that host a
corpuscle in the whole. The wind, rising from the Lybian wastes across the Nile, swept up
against the exposed side of the hotel, and made his windows rattle--the
old, sad winds of Egypt. Henriot got out of bed to fasten the outside
shutters. He stood a moment and watched the moon floating down behind
the Sakkara Pyramids. The Pleiades and Orion's Belt hung brilliantly;
the Great Bear was close to the horizon. In the sky above the Desert
swung ten thousand stars. No sounds rose from the streets of Helouan. The tide of sand was coming slowly in. And a flock of enormous thoughts swooped past him from fields of this
unbelievable, lost memory. The Desert, pale in the moon, was coextensive
with the night, too huge for comfort or understanding, yet charged to
the brim with infinite peace. Behind its majesty of silence lay whispers
of a vanished language that once could call with power upon mighty
spiritual Agencies. Its skirts were folded now, but, slowly across the
leagues of sand, they began to stir and rearrange themselves. He grew
suddenly aware of this enveloping shroud of sand--as the raw material of
bodily expression: Form. The sand was in his imagination and his mind. Shaking loosely the folds
of its gigantic skirts, it rose; it moved a little towards him. He saw
the eternal countenance of the Desert watching him--immobile and
unchanging behind these shifting veils the winds laid so carefully over
it. Egypt, the ancient Egypt, turned in her vast sarcophagus of Desert,
wakening from her sleep of ages at the Belief of approaching
worshippers. Only in this insignificant manner could he express a letter of the
terrific language that crowded to seek expression through his soul.... He closed the shutters and carefully fastened them. He turned to go back
to bed, curiously trembling. Then, as he did so, the whole singular
delusion caught him with a shock that held him motionless. Up rose the
stupendous apparition of the entire Desert and stood behind him on that
balcony. Swift as thought, in silence, the Desert stood on end against
his very face. It towered across the sky, hiding Orion and the moon; it
dipped below the horizons. The whole grey sheet of it rose up before his
eyes and stood. Through its unfolding skirts ran ten thousand eddies of
swirling sand as the creases of its grave-clothes smoothed themselves
out in moonlight. And a bleak, scarred countenance, huge as a planet,
gazed down into his own.... Through his dreamless sleep that night two things lay active and awake
... in the subconscious part that knows no slumber. They were
incongruous. One was evil, small and human; the other unearthly and
sublime. For the memory of the fear that haunted Vance, and the sinister
cause of it, pricked at him all night long. But behind, beyond this
common, intelligible emotion, lay the crowding wonder that caught his
soul with glory:

The Sand was stirring, the Desert was awake. Ready to mate with them in
material form, brooded close the Ka of that colossal Entity that once
expressed itself through the myriad life of ancient Egypt. VI


Next day, and for several days following, Henriot kept out of the path
of Lady Statham and her nephew. The acquaintanceship had grown too
rapidly to be quite comfortable. It was easy to pretend that he took
people at their face value, but it was a pose; one liked to know
something of antecedents. It was otherwise difficult to "place" them. And Henriot, for the life of him, could not "place" these two. His
Subconsciousness brought explanation when it came--but the
Subconsciousness is only temporarily active. When it retired he
floundered without a rudder, in confusion. With the flood of morning sunshine the value of much she had said
evaporated. Her presence alone had supplied the key to the cipher. But
while the indigestible portions he rejected, there remained a good deal
he had already assimilated. The discomfort remained; and with it the
grave, unholy reality of it all. It was something more than theory. Results would follow--if he joined them. He would witness curious
things. The force with which it drew him brought hesitation. It operated in him
like a shock that numbs at first by its abrupt arrival, and needs time
to realise in the right proportions to the rest of life. These right
proportions, however, did not come readily, and his emotions ranged
between sceptical laughter and complete acceptance. The one detail he
felt certain of was this dreadful thing he had divined in Vance. Trying
hard to disbelieve it, he found he could not. It was true. Though
without a shred of real evidence to support it, the horror of it
remained. He knew it in his very bones. And this, perhaps, was what drove him to seek the comforting
companionship of folk he understood and felt at home with.