The tide moved faster, the draw of piled-up cycles urging it.  He emerged upon the plateau, and met the cooler Desert air.  His feet went crunching on the “desert-film” that spread its curious dark shiny carpet as far as the eye could reach; it lay everywhere, unswept and smooth as when the feet of vanished civilizations trod its burning surface, then dipped behind the curtains Time pins against the stars.  And here the body of the tide set all one way.  There was a greater strength of current, draught and suction.  He felt the powerful undertow.  Deeper masses drew his feet sideways, and he felt the rushing of the central body of the sand.  The sands were moving, from their foundation upwards.  He went unresistingly with them.

Turning a moment, he looked back at shining little Helouan in the blaze of evening light.  The voices reached him very faintly, merged now in a general murmur.  Beyond lay the strip of Delta vivid green, the palms, the roofs of Bedrashein, the blue laughter of the Nile with its flocks of curved felucca sails.  Further still, rising above the yellow Libyan horizon, gloomed the vast triangles of a dozen Pyramids, cutting their wedge-shaped clefts out of a sky fast crimsoning through a sea of gold.  Seen thus, their dignity imposed upon the entire landscape.  They towered darkly, symbolic signatures of the ancient Powers that now watched him taking these little steps across their damaged territory.

He gazed a minute, then went on.  He saw the big pale face of the moon in the east.  Above the ever-silent Thing these giant symbols once interpreted, she rose, grand, effortless, half-terrible as themselves.  And, with her, she lifted up this tide of the Desert that drew his feet across the sand to Wadi Hof.  A moment later he dipped below the ridge that buried Helouan and Nile and Pyramids from sight.  He entered the ancient waters.  Time then, in an instant, flowed back behind his footsteps, obliterating every trace.  And with it his mind went too.  He stepped across the gulf of centuries, moving into the Past.  The Desert lay before him—­an open tomb wherein his soul should read presently of things long vanished.

The strange half-lights of sunset began to play their witchery then upon the landscape.  A purple glow came down upon the Mokattam Hills.  Perspective danced its tricks of false, incredible deception.  The soaring kites that were a mile away seemed suddenly close, passing in a moment from the size of gnats to birds with a fabulous stretch of wing.  Ridges and cliffs rushed close without a hint of warning, and level places sank into declivities and basins that made him trip and stumble.  That indescribable quality of the Desert, which makes timid souls avoid the hour of dusk, emerged; it spread everywhere, undisguised.  And the bewilderment it brings is no vain, imagined thing, for it distorts vision utterly, and the effect upon the mind when familiar sight goes floundering is the simplest way in the world of dragging the anchor that grips reality.  At the hour of sunset this bewilderment comes upon a man with a disconcerting swiftness.  It rose now with all this weird rapidity.  Henriot found himself enveloped at a moment’s notice.