imbs of memory, smothered by
the activities of the Present, stirred their stiffened lengths through
the sands of long ago--sands this woman had begun to excavate from some
far-off pre-existence they had surely known together. Vagueness and
certainty ran hand in hand. Details were unrecoverable, but the emotions
in which they were embedded moved.

He turned restlessly in his bed, striving to seize the amazing clues and
follow them. But deliberate effort hid them instantly again; they
retired instantly into the subconsciousness. With the brain of this body
he now occupied they had nothing to do. The brain stored memories of
each life only. This ancient script was graven in his soul.
Subconsciousness alone could interpret and reveal. And it was his
subconscious memory that Lady Statham had been so busily excavating.

Dimly it stirred and moved about the depths within him, never clearly
seen, indefinite, felt as a yearning after unrecoverable knowledge.
Against the darker background of Vance's fear and sinister purpose--both
of this present life, and recent--he saw the grandeur of this woman's
impossible dream, and _knew_, beyond argument or reason, that it was
true. Judgment and will asleep, he left the impossibility aside, and
took the grandeur. The Belief of Lady Statham was not credulity and
superstition; it was Memory. Still to this day, over the sands of Egypt,
hovered immense spiritual potencies, so vast that they could only know
physical expression in a group--in many. Their sphere of bodily
manifestation must be a host, each individual unit in that host a
corpuscle in the whole.

The wind, rising from the Lybian wastes across the Nile, swept up
against the exposed side of the hotel, and made his windows rattle--the
old, sad winds of Egypt. Henriot got out of bed to fasten the outside
shutters. He stood a moment and watched the moon floating down behind
the Sakkara Pyramids. The Pleiades and Orion's Belt hung brilliantly;
the Great Bear was close to the horizon. In the sky above the Desert
swung ten thousand stars. No sounds rose from the streets of Helouan.
The tide of sand was coming slowly in.

And a flock of enormous thoughts swooped past him from fields of this
unbelievable, lost memory. The Desert, pale in the moon, was coextensive
with the night, too huge for comfort or understanding, yet charged to
the brim with infinite peace. Behind its majesty of silence lay whispers
of a vanished language that once c