He tried to dismiss it as imagination, but it would not be dismissed.  The disturbance in himself was caused by something not imaginary, but real.  And then, for the first time, he discovered that the man had brought a faint, elusive suggestion of perfume with him, an aromatic odour, that made him think of priests and churches.  The ghost of it still lingered in the air.  Ah, here then was the origin of the notion that his voice had chanted:  it was surely the suggestion of incense.  But incense, intoning, a compass to find the true north—­at midnight in a Desert hotel!

A touch of uneasiness ran through the curiosity and excitement that he felt.

And he undressed for bed.  “Confound my old imagination,” he thought, “what tricks it plays me!  It’ll keep me awake!”

But the questions, once started in his mind, continued.  He must find explanation of one kind or another before he could lie down and sleep, and he found it at length in—­the stars.  The man was an astronomer of sorts; possibly an astrologer into the bargain!  Why not?  The stars were wonderful above Helouan.  Was there not an observatory on the Mokattam Hills, too, where tourists could use the telescopes on privileged days?  He had it at last.  He even stole out on to his balcony to see if the stranger perhaps was looking through some wonderful apparatus at the heavens.  Their rooms were on the same side.  But the shuttered windows revealed no stooping figure with eyes glued to a telescope.  The stars blinked in their many thousands down upon the silent desert.  The night held neither sound nor movement.  There was a cool breeze blowing across the Nile from the Lybian Sands.  It nipped; and he stepped back quickly into the room again.  Drawing the mosquito curtains carefully about the bed, he put the light out and turned over to sleep.

And sleep came quickly, contrary to his expectations, though it was a light and surface sleep.  That last glimpse of the darkened Desert lying beneath the Egyptian stars had touched him with some hand of awful power that ousted the first, lesser excitement.  It calmed and soothed him in one sense, yet in another, a sense he could not understand, it caught him in a net of deep, deep feelings whose mesh, while infinitely delicate, was utterly stupendous.  His nerves this deeper emotion left alone:  it reached instead to something infinite in him that mere nerves could neither deal with nor interpret.  The soul awoke and whispered in him while his body slept.

And the little, foolish dreams that ran to and fro across this veil of surface sleep brought oddly tangled pictures of things quite tiny and at the same time of others that were mighty beyond words.  With these two counters Nightmare played.  They interwove.  There was the figure of this dark-faced man with the compass, measuring the sky to find the true north, and there were hints of giant Presences that hovered just outside some curious outline that he traced upon the ground, copied in some nightmare fashion from the heavens.  The excitement caused by his visitor’s singular request mingled with the profounder sensations his final look at the stars and Desert stirred.  The two were somehow inter-related.