glad to be with a
crowd--because he was otherwise alone with more than he could dare to
think about. Keeping just ahead of his companions, he crossed the desert
edge where the ghost of Memphis walks under rustling palm trees that
screen no stone left upon another of all its mile-long populous
splendours. For here was a vista his imagination could realise; here he
could know the comfort of solid ground his feet could touch. Gigantic
Ramases, lying on his back beneath their shade and staring at the sky,
similarly helped to steady his swaying thoughts. Imagination could deal
with these.

And daily thus he watched the busy world go to and fro to its scale of
tips and bargaining, and gladly mingled with it, trying to laugh and
study guidebooks, and listen to half-fledged explanations, but always
seeing the comedy of his poor attempts. Not all those little donkeys,
bells tinkling, beads shining, trotting beneath their comical burdens to
the tune of shouting and belabouring, could stem this tide of deeper
things the woman had let loose in the subconscious part of him.
Everywhere he saw the mysterious camels go slouching through the sand,
gurgling the water in their skinny, extended throats. Centuries passed
between the enormous knee-stroke of their stride. And, every night, the
sunsets restored the forbidding, graver mood, with their crimson, golden
splendour, their strange green shafts of light, then--sudden twilight
that brought the Past upon him with an awful leap. Upon the stage then
stepped the figures of this pair of human beings, chanting their ancient
plainsong of incantation in the moonlit desert, and working their rites
of unholy evocation as the priests had worked them centuries before in
the sands that now buried Sakkara fathoms deep.

Then one morning he woke with a question in his mind, as though it had
been asked of him in sleep and he had waked just before the answer came.
"Why do I spend my time sight-seeing, instead of going alone into the
Desert as before? What has made me change?"

This latest mood now asked for explanation. And the answer, coming up
automatically, startled him. It was so clear and sure--had been lying in
the background all along. One word contained it:

Vance.

The sinister intentions of this man, forgotten in the rush of other
emotions, asserted themselves again convincingly. The human horror, so
easily comprehensible, had been smothered for the time by the hint of
unearthly revela