This sound was very faint at first, but grew steadily in volume.  Although no echoes, properly speaking, were possible, these precipices caught stray notes that trooped in from the further sandy reaches.  The figures certainly were chanting, but their chanting was not all he heard.  Other sounds came to his ears from far away, running past him through the air from every side, and from incredible distances, all flocking down into the Wadi bed to join the parent note that summoned them.  The Desert was giving voice.  And memory, lifting her hood yet higher, showed more of her grey, mysterious face that searched his soul with questions.  Had he so soon forgotten that strange union of form and sound which once was known to the evocative rituals of olden days?

Henriot tried patiently to disentangle this desert-music that their intoning voices woke, from the humming of the blood in his own veins.  But he succeeded only in part.  Sand was already in the air.  There was reverberation, rhythm, measure; there was almost the breaking of the stream into great syllables.  But was it due, this strange reverberation, to the countless particles of sand meeting in mid-air about him, or—­to larger bodies, whose surfaces caught this friction of the sand and threw it back against his ears?  The wind, now rising, brought particles that stung his face and hands, and filled his eyes with a minute fine dust that partially veiled the moonlight.  But was not something larger, vaster these particles composed now also on the way?

Movement and sound and flying sand thus merged themselves more and more in a single, whirling torrent.  But Henriot sought no commonplace explanation of what he witnessed; and here was the proof that all happened in some vestibule of inner experience where the strain of question and answer had no business.  One sitting beside him need not have seen anything at all.  His host, for instance, from Helouan, need not have been aware.  Night screened it; Helouan, as the whole of modern experience, stood in front of the screen.  This thing took place behind it.  He crouched motionless, watching in some reconstructed ante-chamber of the soul’s pre-existence, while the torrent grew into a veritable tempest.

Yet Night remained unshaken; the veil of moonlight did not quiver; the stars dropped their slender golden pillars unobstructed.  Calmness reigned everywhere as before.  The stupendous representation passed on behind it all.

But the dignity of the little human movements that he watched had become now indescribable.  The gestures of the arms and bodies invested themselves with consummate grandeur, as these two strode into the caverns behind manifested life and drew forth symbols that represented vanished Powers.  The sound of their chanting voices broke in cadenced fragments against the shores of language.  The words Henriot never actually caught, if words they were; yet he understood their purport—­these Names of Power to which the type of returning life gave answer as they approached.  He remembered fumbling for his drawing materials, with such violence, however, that the pencil snapped in two between his fingers as he touched it.  For now, even here, upon the outer fringe of the ceremonial ground, there was a stir of forces that set the very muscles working in him before he had become aware of it....