The shapes and faces that the hills of sand built round him were the play of excited fancy only.  By sheer force he pinned his thought against this fact:  but further he could not get.  There were Powers at work; they were being stirred, wakened somewhere into activity.  Evocation had already begun.  That sense of their approach as he had walked along from Helouan was not imaginary.  A descent of some type of life, vanished from the world too long for recollection, was on the way,—­so vast that it would manifest itself in a group of forms, a troop, a host, an army.  These two were near him somewhere at this very moment, already long at work, their minds driving beyond this little world.  The valley was emptying itself—­for the descent of life their ritual invited.

And the movement in the sand was likewise true.  He recalled the sentences the woman had used.  “My body,” he reflected, “like the bodies life makes use of everywhere, is mere upright heap of earth and dust and—­sand.  Here in the Desert is the raw material, the greatest store of it in the world.”

And on the heels of it came sharply that other thing:  that this descending Life would press into its service all loose matter within its reach—­to form that sphere of action which would be in a literal sense its Body.

In the first few seconds, as he stood there, he realised all this, and realised it with an overwhelming conviction it was futile to deny.  The fast-emptying valley would later brim with an unaccustomed and terrific life.  Yet Death hid there too—­a little, ugly, insignificant death.  With the name of Vance it flashed upon his mind and vanished, too tiny to be thought about in this torrent of grander messages that shook the depths within his soul.  He bowed his head a moment, hardly knowing what he did.  He could have waited thus a thousand years it seemed.  He was conscious of a wild desire to run away, to hide, to efface himself utterly, his terror, his curiosity, his little wonder, and not be seen of anything.  But it was all vain and foolish.  The Desert saw him.  The Gigantic knew that he was there.  No escape was possible any longer.  Caught by the sand, he stood amid eternal things.  The river of movement swept him too.

These hills, now motionless as statues, would presently glide forward into the cavalcade, sway like vessels, and go past with the procession.  At present only the contents, not the frame, of the Wadi moved.  An immense soft brush of moonlight swept it empty for what was on the way....  But presently the entire Desert would stand up and also go.

Then, making a sideways movement, his feet kicked against something soft and yielding that lay heaped upon the Desert floor, and Henriot discovered the rugs the Arab boy had carefully set down before he made full speed for the friendly lights of Helouan.  The sound of his departing footsteps had long since died away.  He was alone.