The detail restored to him his consciousness of the immediate present, and, stooping, he gathered up the rugs and overcoat and began to make preparations for the night.  But the appointed spot, whence he was to watch, lay upon the summit of the opposite cliffs.  He must cross the Wadi bed and climb.  Slowly and with labour he made his way down a steep cleft into the depth of the Wadi Hof, sliding and stumbling often, till at length he stood upon the floor of shining moonlight.  It was very smooth; windless utterly; still as space; each particle of sand lay in its ancient place asleep.  The movement, it seemed, had ceased.

He clambered next up the eastern side, through pitch-black shadows, and within the hour reached the ledge upon the top whence he could see below him, like a silvered map, the sweep of the valley bed.  The wind nipped keenly here again, coming over the leagues of cooling sand.  Loose boulders of splintered rock, started by his climbing, crashed and boomed into the depths.  He banked the rugs behind him, wrapped himself in his overcoat, and lay down to wait.  Behind him was a two-foot crumbling wall against which he leaned; in front a drop of several hundred feet through space.  He lay upon a platform, therefore, invisible from the Desert at his back.  Below, the curving Wadi formed a natural amphitheatre in which each separate boulder fallen from the cliffs, and even the little silla shrubs the camels eat, were plainly visible.  He noted all the bigger ones among them.  He counted them over half aloud.

And the moving stream he had been unaware of when crossing the bed itself, now began again.  The Wadi went rushing past before the broom of moonlight.  Again, the enormous and the tiny combined in one single strange impression.  For, through this conception of great movement, stirred also a roving, delicate touch that his imagination felt as bird-like.  Behind the solid mass of the Desert’s immobility flashed something swift and light and airy.  Bizarre pictures interpreted it to him, like rapid snap-shots of a huge flying panorama:  he thought of darting dragon-flies seen at Helouan, of children’s little dancing feet, of twinkling butterflies—­of birds.  Chiefly, yes, of a flock of birds in flight, whose separate units formed a single entity.  The idea of the Group-Soul possessed his mind once more.  But it came with a sense of more than curiosity or wonder.  Veneration lay behind it, a veneration touched with awe.  It rose in his deepest thought that here was the first hint of a symbolical representation.  A symbol, sacred and inviolable, belonging to some ancient worship that he half remembered in his soul, stirred towards interpretation through all his being.

He lay there waiting, wondering vaguely where his two companions were, yet fear all vanished because he felt attuned to a scale of things too big to mate with definite dread.  There was high anticipation in him, but not anxiety.  Of himself, as Felix Henriot, indeed, he hardly seemed aware.  He was some one else.  Or, rather, he was himself at a stage he had known once far, far away in a remote pre-existence.  He watched himself from dim summits of a Past, of which no further details were as yet recoverable.