She carried him far beyond mere outline, however, though afterwards he
recalled the details with difficulty. So much more was suggested than
actually expressed. She contrived to make the general modern scepticism
an evidence of cheap mentality. It was so easy; the depth it affects to
conceal, mere emptiness. "We have tried all things, and found all
wanting"--the mind, as measuring instrument, merely confessed
inadequate. Various shrewd judgments of this kind increased his respect,
although her acceptance went so far beyond his own. And, while the label
of credulity refused to stick to her, her sense of imaginative wonder
enabled her to escape that dreadful compromise, a man's mind in a
woman's temperament. She fascinated him. The spiritual worship of the ancient Egyptians, she held, was a
symbolical explanation of things generally alluded to as the secrets of
life and death; their knowledge was a remnant of the wisdom of Atlantis. Material relics, equally misunderstood, still stood to-day at Karnac,
Stonehenge, and in the mysterious writings on buried Mexican temples and
cities, so significantly akin to the hieroglyphics upon the Egyptian
tombs. "The one misinterpreted as literally as the other," she suggested, "yet
both fragments of an advanced knowledge that found its grave in the sea. The Wisdom of that old spiritual system has vanished from the world,
only a degraded literalism left of its undecipherable language. The
jewel has been lost, and the casket is filled with sand, sand, sand." How keenly her black eyes searched his own as she said it, and how oddly
she made the little word resound. The syllable drew out almost into
chanting. Echoes answered from the depths within him, carrying it on and
on across some desert of forgotten belief. Veils of sand flew everywhere
about his mind. Curtains lifted. Whole hills of sand went shifting into
level surfaces whence gardens of dim outline emerged to meet the
sunlight. "But the sand may be removed." It was her nephew, speaking almost for
the first time, and the interruption had an odd effect, introducing a
sharply practical element. For the tone expressed, so far as he dared
express it, disapproval. It was a baited observation, an invitation to
opinion. "We are not sand-diggers, Mr. Henriot," put in Lady Statham, before he
decided to respond. "Our object is quite another one; and I believe--I
have a feeling," she added almost questioningly, "that you might be
interested enough to help us perhaps." He only wondered the direct attack had not come sooner. Its bluntness
hardly surprised him. He felt himself leap forward to accept it. A
sudden subsidence had freed his feet. Then the warning operated suddenly--for an instant. Henriot _was_
interested; more, he was half seduced; but, as yet, he did not mean to
be included in their purposes, whatever these might be. That shrinking
dread came back a moment, and was gone again before he could question
it. His eyes looked full at Lady Statham. "What is it that you know?" they asked her. "Tell me the things we once knew together, you and I. These words are merely trifling. And why does another man now stand in
my place? For the sands heaped upon my memory are shifting, and it is
_you_ who are moving them away." His soul whispered it; his voice said quite another thing, although the
words he used seemed oddly chosen:

"There is much in the ideas of ancient Egypt that has attracted me ever
since I can remember, though I have never caught up with anything
definite enough to follow. There was majesty somewhere in their
conceptions--a large, calm majesty of spiritual dominion, one might call
it perhaps. I _am_ interested." Her face remained expressionless as she listened, but there was grave
conviction in the eyes that held him like a spell. He saw through them
into dim, faint pictures whose background was always sand. He forgot
that he was speaking with a woman, a woman who half an hour ago had been
a stranger to him. He followed these faded mental pictures, though he
never caught them up.... It was like his dream in London. Lady Statham was talking--he had not noticed the means by which she
effected the abrupt transition--of familiar beliefs of old Egypt; of the
Ka, or Double, by whose existence the survival of the soul was possible,
even its return into manifested, physical life; of the astrology, or
influence of the heavenly bodies upon all sublunar activities; of
terrific forms of other life, known to the ancient worship of Atlantis,
great Potencies that might be invoked by ritual and ceremonial, and of
their lesser influence as recognised in certain lower forms, hence
treated with veneration as the "Sacred Animal" branch of this dim
religion. And she spoke lightly of the modern learning which so glibly
imagined it was the animals themselves that were looked upon as
"gods"--the bull, the bird, the crocodile, the cat. "It's there they all
go so absurdly wrong," she said, "taking the symbol for the power
symbolised. Yet natural enough. The mind to-day wears blinkers, studies
only the details seen directly before it. Had none of us experienced
love, we should think the first lover mad. Few to-day know the Powers
_they_ knew, hence deny them. If the world were deaf it would stand with
mockery before a hearing group swayed by an orchestra, pitying both
listeners and performers. It would deem our admiration of a great
swinging bell mere foolish worship of form and movement. Similarly, with
high Powers that once expressed themselves in common forms--where best
they could--being themselves bodiless. The learned men classify the
forms with painstaking detail. But deity has gone out of life. The
Powers symbolised are no longer experienced." "These Powers, you suggest, then--their Kas, as it were--may still--"

But she waved aside the interruption. "They are satisfied, as the common
people were, with a degraded literalism," she went on. "Nut was the
Heavens, who spread herself across the earth in the form of a woman;
Shu, the vastness of space; the ibis typified Thoth, and Hathor was the
Patron of the Western Hills; Khonsu, the moon, was personified, as was
the deity of the Nile. But the high priest of Ra, the sun, you notice,
remained ever the Great One of Visions." The High Priest, the Great One of Visions!--How wonderfully again she
made the sentence sing. She put splendour into it. The pictures shifted
suddenly closer in his mind. He saw the grandeur of Memphis and
Heliopolis rise against the stars and shake the sand of ages from their
stern old temples. "You think it possible, then, to get into touch with these High Powers
you speak of, Powers once manifested in common forms?" Henriot asked the question with a degree of conviction and solemnity
that surprised himself. The scenery changed about him as he listened. The spacious halls of this former khedivial Palace melted into Desert
spaces. He smelt the open wilderness, the sand that haunted Helouan.