Some hours later, before this surface sleep passed into genuine slumber, Henriot woke—­with an appalling feeling that the Desert had come creeping into his room and now stared down upon him where he lay in bed.  The wind was crying audibly about the walls outside.  A faint, sharp tapping came against the window panes.

He sprang instantly out of bed, not yet awake enough to feel actual alarm, yet with the nightmare touch still close enough to cause a sort of feverish, loose bewilderment.  He switched the lights on.  A moment later he knew the meaning of that curious tapping, for the rising wind was flinging tiny specks of sand against the glass.  The idea that they had summoned him belonged, of course, to dream.

He opened the window, and stepped out on to the balcony.  The stone was very cold under his bare feet.  There was a wash of wind all over him.  He saw the sheet of glimmering, pale desert near and far; and something stung his skin below the eyes.

“The sand,” he whispered, “again the sand; always the sand.  Waking or sleeping, the sand is everywhere—­nothing but sand, sand, Sand....”

He rubbed his eyes.  It was like talking in his sleep, talking to Someone who had questioned him just before he woke.  But was he really properly awake?  It seemed next day that he had dreamed it.  Something enormous, with rustling skirts of sand, had just retreated far into the Desert.  Sand went with it—­flowing, trailing, smothering the world.  The wind died down.

And Henriot went back to sleep, caught instantly away into unconsciousness; covered, blinded, swept over by this spreading thing of reddish brown with the great, grey face, whose Being was colossal yet quite tiny, and whose fingers, wings and eyes were countless as the stars.

But all night long it watched and waited, rising to peer above the little balcony, and sometimes entering the room and piling up beside his very pillow.  He dreamed of Sand.

III

For some days Henriot saw little of the man who came from Birmingham and pushed curiosity to a climax by asking for a compass in the middle of the night.  For one thing, he was a good deal with his friends upon the other side of Helouan, and for another, he slept several nights in the Desert.

He loved the gigantic peace the Desert gave him.  The world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it.  Everything faded out.  The soul turned inwards upon itself.

An Arab boy and donkey took out sleeping-bag, food and water to the Wadi Hof, a desolate gorge about an hour eastwards.  It winds between cliffs whose summits rise some thousand feet above the sea.  It opens suddenly, cut deep into the swaying world of level plateaux and undulating hills.  It moves about too; he never found it in the same place twice—­like an arm of the Desert that shifted with the changing lights.  Here he watched dawns and sunsets, slept