Vance!  With a horrid drop from splendour into something mean and sordid, Henriot felt the pain of it.  The motive of the man was so insignificant, his purpose so atrocious.  More and more, with the name, came back—­his first repugnance, fear, suspicion.  And human terror caught him.  He shrieked.  But, as in nightmare, no sound escaped his lips.  He tried to move; a wild desire to interfere, to protect, to prevent, flung him forward—­close to the dizzy edge of the gulf below.  But his muscles refused obedience to the will.  The paralysis of common fear rooted him to the rocks.

But the sudden change of focus instantly destroyed the picture; and so vehement was the fall from glory into meanness, that it dislocated the machinery of clairvoyant vision.  The inner perception clouded and grew dark.  Outer and inner mingled in violent, inextricable confusion.  The wrench seemed almost physical.  It happened all at once, retreat and continuation for a moment somehow combined.  And, if he did not definitely see the awful thing, at least he was aware that it had come to pass.  He knew it as positively as though his eye were glued against a magnifying lens in the stillness of some laboratory.  He witnessed it.

The supreme moment of evocation was close.  Life, through that awful sandy vortex, whirled and raged.  Loose particles showered and pelted, caught by the draught of vehement life that moulded the substance of the Desert into imperial outline—­when, suddenly, shot the little evil thing across that marred and blasted it.

Into the whirlpool flew forward a particle of material that was a human being.  And the Group-Soul caught and used it.

The actual accomplishment Henriot did not claim to see.  He was a witness, but a witness who could give no evidence.  Whether the woman was pushed of set intention, or whether some detail of sound and pattern was falsely used to effect the terrible result, he was helpless to determine.  He pretends no itemised account.  She went.  In one second, with appalling swiftness, she disappeared, swallowed out of space and time within that awful maw—­one little corpuscle among a million through which the Life, now stalking the Desert wastes, moulded itself a troop-like Body.  Sand took her.

There followed emptiness—­a hush of unutterable silence, stillness, peace.  Movement and sound instantly retired whence they came.  The avenues of Memory closed; the Splendours all went down into their sandy tombs....

* * * * *

The moon had sunk into the Libyan wilderness; the eastern sky was red.  The dawn drew out that wondrous sweetness of the Desert, which is as sister to the sweetness that the moonlight brings.  The Desert settled back to sleep, huge, unfathomable, charged to the brim with life that watches, waits, and yet conceals itself behind the ruins of apparent desolation.  And the Wadi, empty at his feet, filled slowly with the gentle little winds that bring the sunrise.