Of himself, as Felix Henriot, indeed, he hardly seemed
aware. He was some one else. Or, rather, he was himself at a stage he
had known once far, far away in a remote pre-existence. He watched
himself from dim summits of a Past, of which no further details were as
yet recoverable. Pencil and sketching-block lay ready to his hand. The moon rose higher,
tucking the shadows ever more closely against the precipices. The silver
passed into a sheet of snowy whiteness, that made every boulder clearly
visible. Solemnity deepened everywhere into awe. The Wadi fled silently
down the stream of hours. It was almost empty now. And then, abruptly,
he was aware of change. The motion altered somewhere. It moved more
quietly; pace slackened; the end of the procession that evacuated the
depth and length of it went trailing past and turned the distant bend. "It's slowing up," he whispered, as sure of it as though he had watched
a regiment of soldiers filing by. The wind took off his voice like a
flying feather of sound. And there _was_ a change. It had begun. Night and the moon stood still
to watch and listen. The wind dropped utterly away. The sand ceased its
shifting movement. The Desert everywhere stopped still, and turned. Some curtain, then, that for centuries had veiled the world, drew
softly up, leaving a shaded vista down which the eyes of his soul peered
towards long-forgotten pictures. Still buried by the sands too deep for
full recovery, he yet perceived dim portions of them--things once
honoured and loved passionately. For once they had surely been to him
the whole of life, not merely a fragment for cheap wonder to inspect. And they were curiously familiar, even as the person of this woman who
now evoked them was familiar. Henriot made no pretence to more definite
remembrance; but the haunting certainty rushed over him, deeper than
doubt or denial, and with such force that he felt no effort to destroy
it. Some lost sweetness of spiritual ambitions, lived for with this
passionate devotion, and passionately worshipped as men to-day worship
fame and money, revived in him with a tempest of high glory. Centres of
memory stirred from an age-long sleep, so that he could have wept at
their so complete obliteration hitherto. That such majesty had departed
from the world as though it never had existed, was a thought for
desolation and for tears. And though the little fragment he was about to
witness might be crude in itself and incomplete, yet it was part of a
vast system that once explored the richest realms of deity. The
reverence in him contained a holiness of the night and of the stars;
great, gentle awe lay in it too; for he stood, aflame with anticipation
and humility, at the gateway of sacred things. And this was the mood, no thrill of cheap excitement or alarm to weaken
in, in which he first became aware that two spots of darkness he had
taken all along for boulders on the snowy valley bed, were actually
something very different. They were living figures. They moved. It was
not the shadows slowly following the moonlight, but the stir of human
beings who all these hours had been motionless as stone. He must have
passed them unnoticed within a dozen yards when he crossed the Wadi bed,
and a hundred times from this very ledge his eyes had surely rested on
them without recognition. Their minds, he knew full well, had not been
inactive as their bodies. The important part of the ancient ritual lay,
he remembered, in the powers of the evoking mind. Here, indeed, was no effective nor theatrical approach of the principal
figures. It had nothing in common with the cheap external ceremonial of
modern days. In forgotten powers of the soul its grandeur lay, potent,
splendid, true. Long before he came, perhaps all through the day, these
two had laboured with their arduous preparations. They were there, part
of the Desert, when hours ago he had crossed the plateau in the
twilight. To them--to this woman's potent working of old ceremonial--had
been due that singular rush of imagination he had felt. He had
interpreted the Desert as alive. Here was the explanation. It _was_
alive. Life was on the way. Long latent, her intense desire summoned it
back to physical expression; and the effect upon him had steadily
increased as he drew nearer to the centre where she would focus its
revival and return. Those singular impressions of being watched and
accompanied were explained. A priest of this old-world worship performed
a genuine evocation; a Great One of Vision revived the cosmic Powers. Henriot watched the small figures far below him with a sense of dramatic
splendour that only this association of far-off Memory could account
for. It was their rising now, and the lifting of their arms to form a
slow revolving outline, that marked the abrupt cessation of the larger
river of movement; for the sweeping of the Wadi sank into sudden
stillness, and these two, with motions not unlike some dance of
deliberate solemnity, passed slowly through the moonlight to and fro. His attention fixed upon them both. All other movement ceased. They
fastened the flow of Time against the Desert's body. What happened then? How could his mind interpret an experience so long
denied that the power of expression, as of comprehension, has ceased to
exist? How translate this symbolical representation, small detail though
it was, of a transcendent worship entombed for most so utterly beyond
recovery? Its splendour could never lodge in minds that conceive Deity
perched upon a cloud within telephoning distance of fashionable
churches. How should he phrase it even to himself, whose memory drew up
pictures from so dim a past that the language fit to frame them lay
unreachable and lost? Henriot did not know. Perhaps he never yet has known. Certainly, at the
time, he did not even try to think. His sensations remain his
own--untranslatable; and even that instinctive description the mind
gropes for automatically, floundered, halted, and stopped dead. Yet
there rose within him somewhere, from depths long drowned in slumber, a
reviving power by which he saw, divined and recollected--remembered
seemed too literal a word--these elements of a worship he once had
personally known. He, too, had worshipped thus. His soul had moved amid
similar evocations in some aeonian past, whence now the sand was being
cleared away. Symbols of stupendous meaning flashed and went their way
across the lifting mists. He hardly caught their meaning, so long it was
since, he had known them; yet they were familiar as the faces seen in
dreams, and some hint of their spiritual significance left faint traces
in his heart by means of which their grandeur reached towards
interpretation. And all were symbols of a cosmic, deific nature; of
Powers that only symbols can express--prayer-books and sacraments used
in the Wisdom Religion of an older time, but to-day known only in the
decrepit, literal shell which is their degradation.