suddenness, was below the horizon
now. The pyramid field had swallowed it. Ra, in his golden boat, sailed
distant seas beyond the Libyan wilderness. Henriot walked on and on,
aware of utter loneliness. He was walking fields of dream, too remote
from modern life to recall companionship he once had surely known. How
dim it was, how deep and distant, how lost in this sea of an
incalculable Past! He walked into the places that are soundless. The
soundlessness of ocean, miles below the surface, was about him. He was
with One only--this unfathomable, silent thing where nothing breathes or
stirs--nothing but sunshine, shadow and the wind-borne sand. Slowly, in
front, the moon climbed up the eastern sky, hanging above the
silence--silence that ran unbroken across the horizons to where Suez
gleamed upon the waters of a sister sea in motion. That moon was
glinting now upon the Arabian Mountains by its desolate shores.
Southwards stretched the wastes of Upper Egypt a thousand miles to meet
the Nubian wilderness. But over all these separate Deserts stirred the
soft whisper of the moving sand--deep murmuring message that Life was on
the way to unwind Death. The Ka of Egypt, swathed in centuries of sand,
hovered beneath the moon towards her ancient tenement.

For the transformation of the Desert now began in earnest. It grew
apace. Before he had gone the first two miles of his hour's journey, the
twilight caught the rocky hills and twisted them into those monstrous
revelations of physiognomies they barely take the trouble to conceal
even in the daytime. And, while he well understood the eroding agencies
that have produced them, there yet rose in his mind a deeper
interpretation lurking just behind their literal meanings. Here, through
the motionless surfaces, that nameless thing the Desert ill conceals
urged outwards into embryonic form and shape, akin, he almost felt, to
those immense deific symbols of Other Life the Egyptians knew and
worshipped. Hence, from the Desert, had first come, he felt, the
unearthly life they typified in their monstrous figures of granite,
evoked in their stately temples, and communed with in the ritual of
their Mystery ceremonials.

This "watching" aspect of the Libyan Desert is really natural enough;
but it is just the natural, Henriot knew, that brings the deepest
revelations. The surface limestones, resisting the erosion, block
themselves ominously against the sky, while the softer sand beneath sets