them on altared pedestals that define their isolation splendidly. Blunt
and unconquerable, these masses now watched him pass between them. The
Desert surface formed them, gave them birth. They rose, they saw, they
sank down again--waves upon a sea that carried forgotten life up from
the depths below. Of forbidding, even menacing type, they somewhere
mated with genuine grandeur. Unformed, according to any standard of
human or of animal faces, they achieved an air of giant physiognomy
which made them terrible. The unwinking stare of eyes--lidless eyes that
yet ever succeed in hiding--looked out under well-marked, level
eyebrows, suggesting a vision that included the motives and purposes of
his very heart. They looked up grandly, understood why he was there, and
then--slowly withdrew their mysterious, penetrating gaze.

The strata built them so marvellously up; the heavy, threatening brows;
thick lips, curved by the ages into a semblance of cold smiles; jowls
drooping into sandy heaps that climbed against the cheeks; protruding
jaws, and the suggestion of shoulders just about to lift the entire
bodies out of the sandy beds--this host of countenances conveyed a
solemnity of expression that seemed everlasting, implacable as Death. Of
human signature they bore no trace, nor was comparison possible between
their kind and any animal life. They peopled the Desert here. And their
smiles, concealed yet just discernible, went broadening with the
darkness into a Desert laughter. The silence bore it underground. But
Henriot was aware of it. The troop of faces slipped into that single,
enormous countenance which is the visage of the Sand. And he saw it
everywhere, yet nowhere.

Thus with the darkness grew his imaginative interpretation of the
Desert. Yet there was construction in it, a construction, moreover, that
was _not_ entirely his own. Powers, he felt, were rising, stirring,
wakening from sleep. Behind the natural faces that he saw, these other
things peered gravely at him as he passed. They used, as it were,
materials that lay ready to their hand. Imagination furnished these
hints of outline, yet the Powers themselves were real. There _was_ this
amazing movement of the sand. By no other manner could his mind have
conceived of such a thing, nor dreamed of this simple, yet dreadful
method of approach.

Approach! that was the word that first stood out and startled him. There
was approach; something was drawing nearer. The Desert