ause before the afterglow.
Everything seemed to be in subtle movement, heaving as a breast heaves
with the breath; swelling slightly, as if in an effort to be more, to
attract attention, to gain in significance. Pale things became livid,
holding apparently some under-brightness which partly penetrated its
envelope, but a brightness that was white and almost frightful. Black
things seemed to glow with blackness. The air quivered. Its silence
surely thrilled with sound--with sound that grew ever louder.

In the east I saw an effect. To the west I turned for the cause. The
sunset light was returning. Horus would not permit Tum to reign even
for a few brief moments, and Khuns, the sacred god of the moon, would be
witness of a conflict in that lovely western region of the ocean of the
sky where the bark of the sun had floated away beneath the mountain
rim upon the red-and-orange tides. The afterglow was like an exquisite
spasm, is always like an exquisite spasm, a beautiful, almost desperate
effort ending in the quiet darkness of defeat. And through that
spasmodic effort a world lived for some minutes with a life that seemed
unreal, startling, magical. Color returned to the sky--color ethereal,
trembling as if it knew it ought not to return. Yet it stayed for a
while and even glowed, though it looked always strangely purified,
and full of a crystal coldness. The birds that flew against it were no
longer birds, but dark, moving ornaments, devised surely by a supreme
artist to heighten here and there the beauty of the sky. Everything that
moved against the afterglow--man, woman, child, camel and donkey, dog
and goat, languishing buffalo, and plunging horse--became at once an
ornament, invented, I fancied, by a genius to emphasize, by relieving
it, the color in which the sky was drowned. And Khuns watched serenely,
as if he knew the end. And almost suddenly the miraculous effort failed.
Things again revealed their truth, whether commonplace or not. That pool
of the Nile was no more a red jewel set in a feathery pattern of strange
design, but only water fading from my sight beyond a group of palms. And
that below me was only a camel going homeward, and that a child leading
a bronze-colored sheep with a curly coat, and that a dusty, flat-roofed
hovel, not the fairy home of jinn, or the abode of some magician working
marvels with the sun-rays he had gathered in his net. The air was no
longer thrilling with music. The breast that ha