Pencil and sketching-block lay ready to his hand.  The moon rose higher, tucking the shadows ever more closely against the precipices.  The silver passed into a sheet of snowy whiteness, that made every boulder clearly visible.  Solemnity deepened everywhere into awe.  The Wadi fled silently down the stream of hours.  It was almost empty now.  And then, abruptly, he was aware of change.  The motion altered somewhere.  It moved more quietly; pace slackened; the end of the procession that evacuated the depth and length of it went trailing past and turned the distant bend.

“It’s slowing up,” he whispered, as sure of it as though he had watched a regiment of soldiers filing by.  The wind took off his voice like a flying feather of sound.

And there was a change.  It had begun.  Night and the moon stood still to watch and listen.  The wind dropped utterly away.  The sand ceased its shifting movement.  The Desert everywhere stopped still, and turned.

Some curtain, then, that for centuries had veiled the world, drew softly up, leaving a shaded vista down which the eyes of his soul peered towards long-forgotten pictures.  Still buried by the sands too deep for full recovery, he yet perceived dim portions of them—­things once honoured and loved passionately.  For once they had surely been to him the whole of life, not merely a fragment for cheap wonder to inspect.  And they were curiously familiar, even as the person of this woman who now evoked them was familiar.  Henriot made no pretence to more definite remembrance; but the haunting certainty rushed over him, deeper than doubt or denial, and with such force that he felt no effort to destroy it.  Some lost sweetness of spiritual ambitions, lived for with this passionate devotion, and passionately worshipped as men to-day worship fame and money, revived in him with a tempest of high glory.  Centres of memory stirred from an age-long sleep, so that he could have wept at their so complete obliteration hitherto.  That such majesty had departed from the world as though it never had existed, was a thought for desolation and for tears.  And though the little fragment he was about to witness might be crude in itself and incomplete, yet it was part of a vast system that once explored the richest realms of deity.  The reverence in him contained a holiness of the night and of the stars; great, gentle awe lay in it too; for he stood, aflame with anticipation and humility, at the gateway of sacred things.

And this was the mood, no thrill of cheap excitement or alarm to weaken in, in which he first became aware that two spots of darkness he had taken all along for boulders on the snowy valley bed, were actually something very different.  They were living figures.  They moved.  It was not the shadows slowly following the moonlight, but the stir of human beings who all these hours had been motionless as stone.  He must have passed them unnoticed within a dozen yards when he crossed the Wadi bed, and a hundred times from this very ledge his eyes had surely rested on them without recognition.  Their minds, he knew full well, had not been inactive as their bodies.  The important part of the ancient ritual lay, he remembered, in the powers of the evoking mind.