ain--well, he could
only call it lilt, that reminded him of plainsong, intoning, chanting.
Drawling was _not_ the word at all.

He tried to dismiss it as imagination, but it would not be dismissed.
The disturbance in himself was caused by something not imaginary, but
real. And then, for the first time, he discovered that the man had
brought a faint, elusive suggestion of perfume with him, an aromatic
odour, that made him think of priests and churches. The ghost of it
still lingered in the air. Ah, here then was the origin of the notion
that his voice had chanted: it was surely the suggestion of incense. But
incense, intoning, a compass to find the true north--at midnight in a
Desert hotel!

A touch of uneasiness ran through the curiosity and excitement that he
felt.

And he undressed for bed. "Confound my old imagination," he thought,
"what tricks it plays me! It'll keep me awake!"

But the questions, once started in his mind, continued. He must find
explanation of one kind or another before he could lie down and sleep,
and he found it at length in--the stars. The man was an astronomer of
sorts; possibly an astrologer into the bargain! Why not? The stars were
wonderful above Helouan. Was there not an observatory on the Mokattam
Hills, too, where tourists could use the telescopes on privileged days?
He had it at last. He even stole out on to his balcony to see if the
stranger perhaps was looking through some wonderful apparatus at the
heavens. Their rooms were on the same side. But the shuttered windows
revealed no stooping figure with eyes glued to a telescope. The stars
blinked in their many thousands down upon the silent desert. The night
held neither sound nor movement. There was a cool breeze blowing across
the Nile from the Lybian Sands. It nipped; and he stepped back quickly
into the room again. Drawing the mosquito curtains carefully about the
bed, he put the light out and turned over to sleep.

And sleep came quickly, contrary to his expectations, though it was a
light and surface sleep. That last glimpse of the darkened Desert lying
beneath the Egyptian stars had touched him with some hand of awful power
that ousted the first, lesser excitement. It calmed and soothed him in
one sense, yet in another, a sense he could not understand, it caught
him in a net of deep, deep feelings whose mesh, while infinitely
delicate, was utterly stupendous. His nerves this deeper emotion left
alone: it reached instead to s