Broad
and powerful too. Henriot looked down upon his thick head of hair. The
personality and voice repelled him. Possibly his face, caught unawares,
betrayed this. "Forgive my startling you," said the other apologetically, while the
softer expression danced in for a moment and disorganised the rigid set
of the face. "The soft carpet, you know. I'm afraid you didn't hear my
tread. I wondered"--he smiled again slightly at the nature of the
request--"if--by any chance--you had a pocket compass you could lend
me?" "Ah, a compass, yes! Please don't apologise. I believe I have one--if
you'll wait a moment. Come in, won't you? I'll have a look." The other thanked him but waited in the passage. Henriot, it so
happened, had a compass, and produced it after a moment's search. "I am greatly indebted to you--if I may return it in the morning. You
will forgive my disturbing you at such an hour. My own is broken, and I
wanted--er--to find the true north." Henriot stammered some reply, and the man was gone. It was all over in a
minute. He locked his door and sat down in his chair to think. The
little incident had upset him, though for the life of him he could not
imagine why. It ought by rights to have been almost ludicrous, yet
instead it was the exact reverse--half threatening. Why should not a man
want a compass? But, again, why should he? And at midnight? The voice,
the eyes, the near presence--what did they bring that set his nerves
thus asking unusual questions? This strange impression that something
grave was happening, something unearthly--how was it born exactly? The
man's proximity came like a shock. It had made him start. He
brought--thus the idea came unbidden to his mind--something with him
that galvanised him quite absurdly, as fear does, or delight, or great
wonder. There was a music in his voice too--a certain--well, he could
only call it lilt, that reminded him of plainsong, intoning, chanting. Drawling was _not_ the word at all. He tried to dismiss it as imagination, but it would not be dismissed. The disturbance in himself was caused by something not imaginary, but
real. And then, for the first time, he discovered that the man had
brought a faint, elusive suggestion of perfume with him, an aromatic
odour, that made him think of priests and churches. The ghost of it
still lingered in the air. Ah, here then was the origin of the notion
that his voice had chanted: it was surely the suggestion of incense. But
incense, intoning, a compass to find the true north--at midnight in a
Desert hotel! A touch of uneasiness ran through the curiosity and excitement that he
felt. And he undressed for bed. "Confound my old imagination," he thought,
"what tricks it plays me! It'll keep me awake!" But the questions, once started in his mind, continued. He must find
explanation of one kind or another before he could lie down and sleep,
and he found it at length in--the stars. The man was an astronomer of
sorts; possibly an astrologer into the bargain! Why not? The stars were
wonderful above Helouan. Was there not an observatory on the Mokattam
Hills, too, where tourists could use the telescopes on privileged days? He had it at last. He even stole out on to his balcony to see if the
stranger perhaps was looking through some wonderful apparatus at the
heavens. Their rooms were on the same side. But the shuttered windows
revealed no stooping figure with eyes glued to a telescope. The stars
blinked in their many thousands down upon the silent desert. The night
held neither sound nor movement. There was a cool breeze blowing across
the Nile from the Lybian Sands. It nipped; and he stepped back quickly
into the room again. Drawing the mosquito curtains carefully about the
bed, he put the light out and turned over to sleep. And sleep came quickly, contrary to his expectations, though it was a
light and surface sleep. That last glimpse of the darkened Desert lying
beneath the Egyptian stars had touched him with some hand of awful power
that ousted the first, lesser excitement. It calmed and soothed him in
one sense, yet in another, a sense he could not understand, it caught
him in a net of deep, deep feelings whose mesh, while infinitely
delicate, was utterly stupendous. His nerves this deeper emotion left
alone: it reached instead to something infinite in him that mere nerves
could neither deal with nor interpret. The soul awoke and whispered in
him while his body slept. And the little, foolish dreams that ran to and fro across this veil of
surface sleep brought oddly tangled pictures of things quite tiny and at
the same time of others that were mighty beyond words. With these two
counters Nightmare played. They interwove. There was the figure of this
dark-faced man with the compass, measuring the sky to find the true
north, and there were hints of giant Presences that hovered just outside
some curious outline that he traced upon the ground, copied in some
nightmare fashion from the heavens. The excitement caused by his
visitor's singular request mingled with the profounder sensations his
final look at the stars and Desert stirred. The two were somehow
inter-related. Some hours later, before this surface sleep passed into genuine slumber,
Henriot woke--with an appalling feeling that the Desert had come
creeping into his room and now stared down upon him where he lay in bed. The wind was crying audibly about the walls outside. A faint, sharp
tapping came against the window panes. He sprang instantly out of bed, not yet awake enough to feel actual
alarm, yet with the nightmare touch still close enough to cause a sort
of feverish, loose bewilderment. He switched the lights on. A moment
later he knew the meaning of that curious tapping, for the rising wind
was flinging tiny specks of sand against the glass. The idea that they
had summoned him belonged, of course, to dream. He opened the window, and stepped out on to the balcony. The stone was
very cold under his bare feet. There was a wash of wind all over him. He
saw the sheet of glimmering, pale desert near and far; and something
stung his skin below the eyes. "The sand," he whispered, "again the sand; always the sand. Waking or
sleeping, the sand is everywhere--nothing but sand, sand, Sand...."

He rubbed his eyes. It was like talking in his sleep, talking to Someone
who had questioned him just before he woke. But was he really properly
awake? It seemed next day that he had dreamed it. Something enormous,
with rustling skirts of sand, had just retreated far into the Desert. Sand went with it--flowing, trailing, smothering the world. The wind
died down. And Henriot went back to sleep, caught instantly away into
unconsciousness; covered, blinded, swept over by this spreading thing of
reddish brown with the great, grey face, whose Being was colossal yet
quite tiny, and whose fingers, wings and eyes were countless as the
stars.