ould call with power upon mighty
spiritual Agencies. Its skirts were folded now, but, slowly across the
leagues of sand, they began to stir and rearrange themselves. He grew
suddenly aware of this enveloping shroud of sand--as the raw material of
bodily expression: Form.

The sand was in his imagination and his mind. Shaking loosely the folds
of its gigantic skirts, it rose; it moved a little towards him. He saw
the eternal countenance of the Desert watching him--immobile and
unchanging behind these shifting veils the winds laid so carefully over
it. Egypt, the ancient Egypt, turned in her vast sarcophagus of Desert,
wakening from her sleep of ages at the Belief of approaching
worshippers.

Only in this insignificant manner could he express a letter of the
terrific language that crowded to seek expression through his soul....
He closed the shutters and carefully fastened them. He turned to go back
to bed, curiously trembling. Then, as he did so, the whole singular
delusion caught him with a shock that held him motionless. Up rose the
stupendous apparition of the entire Desert and stood behind him on that
balcony. Swift as thought, in silence, the Desert stood on end against
his very face. It towered across the sky, hiding Orion and the moon; it
dipped below the horizons. The whole grey sheet of it rose up before his
eyes and stood. Through its unfolding skirts ran ten thousand eddies of
swirling sand as the creases of its grave-clothes smoothed themselves
out in moonlight. And a bleak, scarred countenance, huge as a planet,
gazed down into his own....

Through his dreamless sleep that night two things lay active and awake
... in the subconscious part that knows no slumber. They were
incongruous. One was evil, small and human; the other unearthly and
sublime. For the memory of the fear that haunted Vance, and the sinister
cause of it, pricked at him all night long. But behind, beyond this
common, intelligible emotion, lay the crowding wonder that caught his
soul with glory:

The Sand was stirring, the Desert was awake. Ready to mate with them in
material form, brooded close the Ka of that colossal Entity that once
expressed itself through the myriad life of ancient Egypt.

VI

Next day, and for several days following, Henriot kept out of the path
of Lady Statham and her nephew. The acquaintanceship had grown too
rapidly to be quite comfortable. It was easy to pretend that he took
people at their face valu