ish brown with the great, grey face, whose Being was colossal yet
quite tiny, and whose fingers, wings and eyes were countless as the
stars.

But all night long it watched and waited, rising to peer above the
little balcony, and sometimes entering the room and piling up beside his
very pillow. He dreamed of Sand.

III

For some days Henriot saw little of the man who came from Birmingham and
pushed curiosity to a climax by asking for a compass in the middle of
the night. For one thing, he was a good deal with his friends upon the
other side of Helouan, and for another, he slept several nights in the
Desert.

He loved the gigantic peace the Desert gave him. The world was forgotten
there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it. Everything faded
out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.

An Arab boy and donkey took out sleeping-bag, food and water to the Wadi
Hof, a desolate gorge about an hour eastwards. It winds between cliffs
whose summits rise some thousand feet above the sea. It opens suddenly,
cut deep into the swaying world of level plateaux and undulating hills.
It moves about too; he never found it in the same place twice--like an
arm of the Desert that shifted with the changing lights. Here he watched
dawns and sunsets, slept through the mid-day heat, and enjoyed the
unearthly colouring that swept Day and Night across the huge horizons.
In solitude the Desert soaked down into him. At night the jackals cried
in the darkness round his cautiously-fed camp fire--small, because wood
had to be carried--and in the day-time kites circled overhead to inspect
him, and an occasional white vulture flapped across the blue. The weird
desolation of this rocky valley, he thought, was like the scenery of the
moon. He took no watch with him, and the arrival of the donkey boy an
hour after sunrise came almost from another planet, bringing things of
time and common life out of some distant gulf where they had lain
forgotten among lost ages.

The short hour of twilight brought, too, a bewitchment into the silence
that was a little less than comfortable. Full light or darkness he could
manage, but this time of half things made him want to shut his eyes and
hide. Its effect stepped over imagination. The mind got lost. He could
not understand it. For the cliffs and boulders of discoloured limestone
shone then with an inward glow that signalled to the Desert with veiled
lanterns. The misshappen hills, carved by wind