ur 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. The
soft-footed Arab servants moved across the hall in their white sheets
like eddies of dust the wind stirred from the Libyan dunes. And over
these two strangers close beside him stole a queer, indefinite
alteration. Moods and emotions, nameless as unknown stars, rose through
his soul, trailing dark mists of memory from unfathomable distances.

Lady Statham answered him indirectly. He found himself wishing that
those steady eyes would sometimes close.

"Love is known only by feeling it," she said, her voice deepening a
little. "Behind the form you feel the person loved. The process is an
evocation, pure and simple. An arduous ceremonial, involving worship and
devotional preparation, is the means. It is a difficult ritual--the
only one acknowledged by the world as still effectual. Ritual is the
passage way of the soul into the Infinite."

He might have said the words himself. The thought lay in him while she
uttered it. Evocation everywhere in life was as true as assimilation.
Nevertheless, he stared his companion full in the eyes with a touch of
almost rude amazement. But no further questions prompted themselves; or,
rather, he declined to ask them. He recalled, somehow uneasily, that in
ceremonial the points of the compass have significance, standing for
forces and activities that sleep there until invoked, and a passing
light fell upon that curious midnight request in the corridor upstairs.
These two were on the track of undesirable experiments, he thought....
They wished to include him too.

"You go at night sometimes into the Desert?" he heard himself saying. It
was impulsive and miscalculated. His feeling that it would be wise to
change the conversation resulted in giving it fresh impetus instead.

"We saw you there--in the Wadi Hof," put in Vance, suddenly breaking his
long silence; "you too sleep out, then? It means, you k