Then came the moment when his heart leaped against his ribs with a sudden violence that was almost pain, standing a second later still as death.  The lines upon the valley floor ceased their maze-like dance.  All movement stopped.  Sound died away.  In the midst of this profound and dreadful silence the sigils lay empty there below him.  They waited to be in-formed.  For the moment of entrance had come at last.  Life was close.

And he understood why this return of life had all along suggested a Procession and could be no mere momentary flash of vision.  From such appalling distance did it sweep down towards the present.

Upon this network, then, of splendid lines, at length held rigid, the entire Desert reared itself with walls of curtained sand, that dwarfed the cliffs, the shouldering hills, the very sky.  The Desert stood on end.  As once before he had dreamed it from his balcony windows, it rose upright, towering, and close against his face.  It built sudden ramparts to the stars that chambered the thing he witnessed behind walls no centuries could ever bring down crumbling into dust.

He himself, in some curious fashion, lay just outside, viewing it apart.  As from a pinnacle, he peered within—­peered down with straining eyes into the vast picture-gallery Memory threw abruptly open.  And the picture spaced its noble outline thus against the very stars.  He gazed between columns, that supported the sky itself, like pillars of sand that swept across the field of vanished years.  Sand poured and streamed aside, laying bare the Past.

For down the enormous vista into which he gazed, as into an avenue running a million miles towards a tiny point, he saw this moving Thing that came towards him, shaking loose the countless veils of sand the ages had swathed about it.  The Ka of buried Egypt wakened out of sleep.  She had heard the potent summons of her old, time-honoured ritual.  She came.  She stretched forth an arm towards the worshippers who evoked her.  Out of the Desert, out of the leagues of sand, out of the immeasurable wilderness which was her mummied Form and Body, she rose and came.  And this fragment of her he would actually see—­this little portion that was obedient to the stammered and broken ceremonial.  The partial revelation he would witness—­yet so vast, even this little bit of it, that it came as a Procession and a host.

For a moment there was nothing.  And then the voice of the woman rose in a resounding cry that filled the Wadi to its furthest precipices, before it died away again to silence.  That a human voice could produce such volume, accent, depth, seemed half incredible.  The walls of towering sand swallowed it instantly.  But the Procession of life, needing a group, a host, an army for its physical expression, reached at that moment the nearer end of the huge avenue.  It touched the Present; it entered the world of men.

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