she talked the spirit of old Egypt moved up, staring down upon him out of eyes lidded so curiously level.  Hitherto all had prated to him of the Arabs, their ancient faith and customs, and the splendour of the Bedouins, those Princes of the Desert.  But what he sought, barely confessed in words even to himself, was something older far than this.  And this strange, dark woman brought it close.  Deeps in his soul, long slumbering, awoke.  He heard forgotten questions.

Only in this brief way could he attempt to sum up the storm she roused in him.

She carried him far beyond mere outline, however, though afterwards he recalled the details with difficulty.  So much more was suggested than actually expressed.  She contrived to make the general modern scepticism an evidence of cheap mentality.  It was so easy; the depth it affects to conceal, mere emptiness.  “We have tried all things, and found all wanting”—­the mind, as measuring instrument, merely confessed inadequate.  Various shrewd judgments of this kind increased his respect, although her acceptance went so far beyond his own.  And, while the label of credulity refused to stick to her, her sense of imaginative wonder enabled her to escape that dreadful compromise, a man’s mind in a woman’s temperament.  She fascinated him.

The spiritual worship of the ancient Egyptians, she held, was a symbolical explanation of things generally alluded to as the secrets of life and death; their knowledge was a remnant of the wisdom of Atlantis.  Material relics, equally misunderstood, still stood to-day at Karnac, Stonehenge, and in the mysterious writings on buried Mexican temples and cities, so significantly akin to the hieroglyphics upon the Egyptian tombs.

“The one misinterpreted as literally as the other,” she suggested, “yet both fragments of an advanced knowledge that found its grave in the sea.  The Wisdom of that old spiritual system has vanished from the world, only a degraded literalism left of its undecipherable language.  The jewel has been lost, and the casket is filled with sand, sand, sand.”

How keenly her black eyes searched his own as she said it, and how oddly she made the little word resound.  The syllable drew out almost into chanting.  Echoes answered from the depths within him, carrying it on and on across some desert of forgotten belief.  Veils of sand flew everywhere about his mind.  Curtains lifted.  Whole hills of sand went shifting into level surfaces whence gardens of dim outline emerged to meet the sunlight.

“But the sand may be removed.”  It was her nephew, speaking almost for the first time, and the interruption had an odd effect, introducing a sharply practical element.  For the tone expressed, so far as he dared express it, disapproval.  It was a baited observation, an invitation to opinion.

“We are not sand-diggers, Mr. Henriot,” put in Lady Statham, before he decided to respond.  “Our object is quite another one; and I believe—­I have a feeling,” she added almost questioningly, “that you might be interested enough to help us perhaps.”