imself that it was play, the solemn reality, of
what lay ahead increased amazingly, sketched darkly in his very soul.

These intervening days he spent as best he could--impatiently, a prey to
quite opposite emotions. In the blazing sunshine he thought of it and
laughed; but at night he lay often sleepless, calculating chances of
escape. He never did escape, however. The Desert that watched little
Helouan with great, unwinking eyes watched also every turn and twist he
made. Like this oasis, he basked in the sun of older time, and dreamed
beneath forgotten moons. The sand at last had crept into his inmost
heart. It sifted over him.

Seeking a reaction from normal, everyday things, he made tourist trips;
yet, while recognising the comedy in his attitude, he never could lose
sight of the grandeur that banked it up so hauntingly. These two
contrary emotions grafted themselves on all he did and saw. He crossed
the Nile at Bedrashein, and went again to the Tomb-World of Sakkara; but
through all the chatter of veiled and helmeted tourists, the
_bandar-log_ of our modern Jungle, ran this dark under-stream of awe
their monkey methods could not turn aside. One world lay upon another,
but this modern layer was a shallow crust that, like the phenomenon of
the "desert-film," a mere angle of falling light could instantly
obliterate. Beneath the sand, deep down, he passed along the Street of
Tombs, as he had often passed before, moved then merely by historical
curiosity and admiration, but now by emotions for which he found no
name. He saw the enormous sarcophagi of granite in their gloomy chambers
where the sacred bulls once lay, swathed and embalmed like human beings,
and, in the flickering candle light, the mood of ancient rites surged
round him, menacing his doubts and laughter. The least human whisper in
these subterraneans, dug out first four thousand years ago, revived
ominous Powers that stalked beside him, forbidding and premonitive. He
gazed at the spots where Mariette, unearthing them forty years ago,
found fresh as of yesterday the marks of fingers and naked feet--of
those who set the sixty-five ton slabs in position. And when he came up
again into the sunshine he met the eternal questions of the pyramids,
overtopping all his mental horizons. Sand blocked all the avenues of
younger emotion, leaving the channels of something in him incalculably
older, open and clean swept.

He slipped homewards, uncomfortable and followed,