The wind, rising from the Lybian wastes across the Nile, swept up against the exposed side of the hotel, and made his windows rattle—­the old, sad winds of Egypt.  Henriot got out of bed to fasten the outside shutters.  He stood a moment and watched the moon floating down behind the Sakkara Pyramids.  The Pleiades and Orion’s Belt hung brilliantly; the Great Bear was close to the horizon.  In the sky above the Desert swung ten thousand stars.  No sounds rose from the streets of Helouan.  The tide of sand was coming slowly in.

And a flock of enormous thoughts swooped past him from fields of this unbelievable, lost memory.  The Desert, pale in the moon, was coextensive with the night, too huge for comfort or understanding, yet charged to the brim with infinite peace.  Behind its majesty of silence lay whispers of a vanished language that once could call with power upon mighty spiritual Agencies.  Its skirts were folded now, but, slowly across the leagues of sand, they began to stir and rearrange themselves.  He grew suddenly aware of this enveloping shroud of sand—­as the raw material of bodily expression:  Form.

The sand was in his imagination and his mind.  Shaking loosely the folds of its gigantic skirts, it rose; it moved a little towards him.  He saw the eternal countenance of the Desert watching him—­immobile and unchanging behind these shifting veils the winds laid so carefully over it.  Egypt, the ancient Egypt, turned in her vast sarcophagus of Desert, wakening from her sleep of ages at the Belief of approaching worshippers.

Only in this insignificant manner could he express a letter of the terrific language that crowded to seek expression through his soul....  He closed the shutters and carefully fastened them.  He turned to go back to bed, curiously trembling.  Then, as he did so, the whole singular delusion caught him with a shock that held him motionless.  Up rose the stupendous apparition of the entire Desert and stood behind him on that balcony.  Swift as thought, in silence, the Desert stood on end against his very face.  It towered across the sky, hiding Orion and the moon; it dipped below the horizons.  The whole grey sheet of it rose up before his eyes and stood.  Through its unfolding skirts ran ten thousand eddies of swirling sand as the creases of its grave-clothes smoothed themselves out in moonlight.  And a bleak, scarred countenance, huge as a planet, gazed down into his own....

Through his dreamless sleep that night two things lay active and awake ... in the subconscious part that knows no slumber.  They were incongruous.  One was evil, small and human; the other unearthly and sublime.  For the memory of the fear that haunted Vance, and the sinister cause of it, pricked at him all night long.  But behind, beyond this common, intelligible emotion, lay the crowding wonder that caught his soul with glory: 

The Sand was stirring, the Desert was awake.  Ready to mate with them in material form, brooded close the Ka of that colossal Entity that once expressed itself through the myriad life of ancient Egypt.