is soul should read presently of
things long vanished.

The strange half-lights of sunset began to play their witchery then upon
the landscape. A purple glow came down upon the Mokattam Hills.
Perspective danced its tricks of false, incredible deception. The
soaring kites that were a mile away seemed suddenly close, passing in a
moment from the size of gnats to birds with a fabulous stretch of wing.
Ridges and cliffs rushed close without a hint of warning, and level
places sank into declivities and basins that made him trip and stumble.
That indescribable quality of the Desert, which makes timid souls avoid
the hour of dusk, emerged; it spread everywhere, undisguised. And the
bewilderment it brings is no vain, imagined thing, for it distorts
vision utterly, and the effect upon the mind when familiar sight goes
floundering is the simplest way in the world of dragging the anchor that
grips reality. At the hour of sunset this bewilderment comes upon a man
with a disconcerting swiftness. It rose now with all this weird
rapidity. Henriot found himself enveloped at a moment's notice.

But, knowing well its effect, he tried to judge it and pass on. The
other matters, the object of his journey chief of all, he refused to
dwell upon with any imagination. Wisely, his mind, while never losing
sight of it, declined to admit the exaggeration that over-elaborate
thinking brings. "I'm going to witness an incredible experiment in which
two enthusiastic religious dreamers believe firmly," he repeated to
himself. "I have agreed to draw--anything I see. There may be truth in
it, or they may be merely self-suggested vision due to an artificial
exaltation of their minds. I'm interested--perhaps against my better
judgment. Yet I'll see the adventure out--because I _must_."

This was the attitude he told himself to take. Whether it was the real
one, or merely adopted to warm a cooling courage, he could not tell. The
emotions were so complex and warring. His mind, automatically, kept
repeating this comforting formula. Deeper than that he could not see to
judge. For a man who knew the full content of his thought at such a time
would solve some of the oldest psychological problems in the world. Sand
had already buried judgment, and with it all attempt to explain the
adventure by the standards acceptable to his brain of to-day. He steered
subconsciously through a world of dim, huge, half-remembered wonders.

The sun, with that abrupt Egyptian