to influence the very details of daily life? Behind
them, for all their vagueness, lay an archetypal splendour, fraught with
forgotten meanings. He had always been aware of it in this mysterious
land, but it had ever hitherto eluded him. It hovered everywhere. He had
felt it brooding behind the towering Colossi at Thebes, in the skeletons
of wasted temples, in the uncouth comeliness of the Sphinx, and in the
crude terror of the Pyramids even. Over the whole of Egypt hung its
invisible wings. These were but isolated fragments of the Body that
might express it. And the Desert remained its cleanest, truest symbol.
Sand knew it closest. Sand might even give it bodily form and outline.

But, while it escaped description in his mind, as equally it eluded
visualisation in his soul, he felt that it combined with its vastness
something infinitely small as well. Of such wee particles is the giant
Desert born....

Henriot started nervously in his chair, convicted once more of
unconscionable staring; and at the same moment a group of hotel people,
returning from a dance, passed through the hall and nodded him
good-night. The scent of the women reached him; and with it the sound of
their voices discussing personalities just left behind. A London
atmosphere came with them. He caught trivial phrases, uttered in a
drawling tone, and followed by the shrill laughter of a girl. They
passed upstairs, discussing their little things, like marionettes upon a
tiny stage.

But their passage brought him back to things of modern life, and to some
standard of familiar measurement. The pictures that his soul had gazed
at so deep within, he realised, were a pictorial transfer caught
incompletely from this woman's vivid mind. He had seen the Desert as the
grey, enormous Tomb where hovered still the Ka of ancient Egypt. Sand
screened her visage with the veil of centuries. But She was there, and
She was living. Egypt herself had pitched a temporary camp in him, and
then moved on.

There was a momentary break, a sense of abruptness and dislocation. And
then he became aware that Lady Statham had been speaking for some time
before he caught her actual words, and that a certain change had come
into her voice as also into her manner.

V

She was leaning closer to him, her face suddenly glowing and alive.
Through the stone figure coursed the fires of a passion that deepened
the coal-black eyes and communicated a hint of light--of exaltation--