The cold,
the darkness, the silence which cannot answer, the stupendous mystery
which is the spell of its inscrutable Presence, had risen about them
in the dusk, and kept them company at a little distance, until the
lights of Helouan had bade it halt. Life which may not, cannot end, had
frightened her. His time, perhaps, was even shorter than her own. None knew his secret,
since he was alone in Egypt and was caring for himself. Similarly,
since she bravely kept her terror to herself, her mother had no inkling
of her own, aware merely that the disease was in her system and that
her orders were to be extremely cautious. This couple, therefore,
shared secretly together the two clearest glimpses of eternity life
has to offer to the soul. Side by side they looked into the splendid
eyes of Love and Death. Life, moreover, with its instinct for simple
and terrific drama, had produced this majestic climax, breaking with
pathos, at the very moment when it could not be developed--this side
of the stars. They stood together upon the stage, a stage emptied of
other human players; the audience had gone home and the lights were
being lowered; no music sounded; the critics were a-bed. In this great
game of Consequences it was known where he met her, what he said and
what she answered, possibly what they did and even what the world
thought. But "what the consequence was" would remain unknown, untold. That would happen in the big spaces of which the desert in its silence,
its motionless serenity, its shelterless, intolerable vastness, is the
perfect symbol. And the desert gives no answer. It sounds no challenge,
for it is complete. Life in the desert makes no sign. It _is_. 4

In the hotel that night there arrived by chance a famous International
dancer, whose dahabîyeh lay anchored at San Giovanni, in the Nile below
Helouan; and this woman, with her party, had come to dine and take
part in the festivities. The news spread. After twelve the lights were
lowered, and while the moonlight flooded the terraces, streaming past
pillar and colonnade, she rendered in the shadowed halls the music of
the Masters, interpreting with an instinctive genius messages which are
eternal and divine. Among the crowd of enthralled and delighted guests, the girl sat
on the steps and watched her. The rhythmical interpretation held a
power that seemed, in a sense, inspired; there lay in it a certain
unconscious something that was pure, unearthly; something that the
stars, wheeling in stately movements over the sea and desert know;
something the great winds bring to mountains where they play together;
something the forests capture and fix magically into their gathering
of big and little branches. It was both passionate and spiritual, wild
and tender, intensely human and seductively non-human. For it was
original, taught of Nature, a revelation of naked, unhampered life. It
comforted, as the desert comforts. It brought the desert awe into the
stuffy corridors of the hotel, with the moonlight and the whispering
of stars, yet behind it ever the silence of those grey, mysterious,
interminable spaces which utter to themselves the wordless song of
life. For it was the same dim thing, she felt, that had followed her
from the desert several hours before, halting just outside the streets
and houses as though blocked from further advance; the thing that
had stopped her foolish painting, skilled though she was, because it
hides behind colour and not in it; the thing that veiled the meaning
in the cryptic sentences she and he had stammered out together; the
thing, in a word, as near as she could approach it by any means of
interior expression, that the realisation of death for the first time
makes comprehensible--Immortality. It was unutterable, but it _was_. He and she were indissolubly together. Death was no separation. There
was no death.... It was terrible. It was--she had already used the
word--awful, full of awe. "In the desert," thought whispered, as she watched spellbound, "it
is impossible even to conceive of death. The idea is meaningless. It
simply is not." The music and the movement filled the air with life which, being
there, must continue always, and continuing always can have never had
a beginning. Death, therefore, was the great revealer of life. Without
it none could realise that they are alive. Others had discovered this
before her, but she did not know it. In the desert no one can realise
death: it is hope and life that are the only certainty. The entire
conception of the Egyptian system was based on this--the conviction,
sure and glorious, of life's endless continuation. Their tombs and
temples, their pyramids and sphinxes surviving after thousands of
years, defy the passage of time and laugh at death; the very bodies
of their priests and kings, of their animals even, their fish, their
insects, stand to-day as symbols of their stalwart knowledge. And this girl, as she listened to the music and watched the inspired
dancing, remembered it. The message poured into her from many sides,
though the desert brought it clearest. With death peering into her face
a few short weeks ahead, she thought instead of--life. The desert,
as it were, became for her a little fragment of eternity, focused
into an intelligible point for her mind to rest upon with comfort
and comprehension. Her steady, thoughtful nature stirred towards an
objective far beyond the small enclosure of one narrow lifetime. The
scale of the desert stretched her to the grandeur of its own imperial
meaning, its divine repose, its unassailable and everlasting majesty. She looked beyond the wall. Eternity! That which is endless; without pause, without beginning,
without divisions or boundaries. The fluttering of her brave yet
frightened spirit ceased, aware with awe of its own everlastingness. The swiftest motion produces the effect of immobility; excessive
light is darkness; size, run loose into enormity, is the same as the
minutely tiny. Similarly, in the desert, life, too overwhelming and
terrific to know limit or confinement, lies undetailed and stupendous,
still as deity, a revelation of nothingness because it is all. Turned
golden beneath its spell that the music and the rhythm made even more
comprehensible, the soul in her, already lying beneath the shadow of
the great wave, sank into rest and peace, too certain of itself to
fear. And panic fled away. "I am immortal ... because I _am_. And what
I love is not apart from me. It is myself. We are together endlessly
because we _are_." Yet in reality, though the big desert brought this, it was Love,
which, being of similar parentage, interpreted its vast meaning to her
little heart--that sudden love which, without a word of preface or
explanation, had come to her a short three weeks before.... She went
up to her room soon after midnight, abruptly, unexpectedly stricken. Some one, it seemed, had called her name. She passed his door. The lights had been turned up.