But, knowing well its effect, he tried to judge it and pass on.  The other matters, the object of his journey chief of all, he refused to dwell upon with any imagination.  Wisely, his mind, while never losing sight of it, declined to admit the exaggeration that over-elaborate thinking brings.  “I’m going to witness an incredible experiment in which two enthusiastic religious dreamers believe firmly,” he repeated to himself.  “I have agreed to draw—­anything I see.  There may be truth in it, or they may be merely self-suggested vision due to an artificial exaltation of their minds.  I’m interested—­perhaps against my better judgment.  Yet I’ll see the adventure out—­because I must.”

This was the attitude he told himself to take.  Whether it was the real one, or merely adopted to warm a cooling courage, he could not tell.  The emotions were so complex and warring.  His mind, automatically, kept repeating this comforting formula.  Deeper than that he could not see to judge.  For a man who knew the full content of his thought at such a time would solve some of the oldest psychological problems in the world.  Sand had already buried judgment, and with it all attempt to explain the adventure by the standards acceptable to his brain of to-day.  He steered subconsciously through a world of dim, huge, half-remembered wonders.

The sun, with that abrupt Egyptian suddenness, was below the horizon now.  The pyramid field had swallowed it.  Ra, in his golden boat, sailed distant seas beyond the Libyan wilderness.  Henriot walked on and on, aware of utter loneliness.  He was walking fields of dream, too remote from modern life to recall companionship he once had surely known.  How dim it was, how deep and distant, how lost in this sea of an incalculable Past!  He walked into the places that are soundless.  The soundlessness of ocean, miles below the surface, was about him.  He was with One only—­this unfathomable, silent thing where nothing breathes or stirs—­nothing but sunshine, shadow and the wind-borne sand.  Slowly, in front, the moon climbed up the eastern sky, hanging above the silence—­silence that ran unbroken across the horizons to where Suez gleamed upon the waters of a sister sea in motion.  That moon was glinting now upon the Arabian Mountains by its desolate shores.  Southwards stretched the wastes of Upper Egypt a thousand miles to meet the Nubian wilderness.  But over all these separate Deserts stirred the soft whisper of the moving sand—­deep murmuring message that Life was on the way to unwind Death.  The Ka of Egypt, swathed in centuries of sand, hovered beneath the moon towards her ancient tenement.