gainst something soft
and yielding that lay heaped upon the Desert floor, and Henriot
discovered the rugs the Arab boy had carefully set down before he made
full speed for the friendly lights of Helouan. The sound of his
departing footsteps had long since died away. He was alone.

The detail restored to him his consciousness of the immediate present,
and, stooping, he gathered up the rugs and overcoat and began to make
preparations for the night. But the appointed spot, whence he was to
watch, lay upon the summit of the opposite cliffs. He must cross the
Wadi bed and climb. Slowly and with labour he made his way down a steep
cleft into the depth of the Wadi Hof, sliding and stumbling often, till
at length he stood upon the floor of shining moonlight. It was very
smooth; windless utterly; still as space; each particle of sand lay in
its ancient place asleep. The movement, it seemed, had ceased.

He clambered next up the eastern side, through pitch-black shadows, and
within the hour reached the ledge upon the top whence he could see below
him, like a silvered map, the sweep of the valley bed. The wind nipped
keenly here again, coming over the leagues of cooling sand. Loose
boulders of splintered rock, started by his climbing, crashed and boomed
into the depths. He banked the rugs behind him, wrapped himself in his
overcoat, and lay down to wait. Behind him was a two-foot crumbling wall
against which he leaned; in front a drop of several hundred feet through
space. He lay upon a platform, therefore, invisible from the Desert at
his back. Below, the curving Wadi formed a natural amphitheatre in which
each separate boulder fallen from the cliffs, and even the little
_silla_ shrubs the camels eat, were plainly visible. He noted all the
bigger ones among them. He counted them over half aloud.

And the moving stream he had been unaware of when crossing the bed
itself, now began again. The Wadi went rushing past before the broom of
moonlight. Again, the enormous and the tiny combined in one single
strange impression. For, through this conception of great movement,
stirred also a roving, delicate touch that his imagination felt as
bird-like. Behind the solid mass of the Desert's immobility flashed
something swift and light and airy. Bizarre pictures interpreted it to
him, like rapid snap-shots of a huge flying panorama: he thought of
darting dragon-flies seen at Helouan, of children's little dancing feet,
of twinkling butterfli