es--of birds. Chiefly, yes, of a flock of birds in
flight, whose separate units formed a single entity. The idea of the
Group-Soul possessed his mind once more. But it came with a sense of
more than curiosity or wonder. Veneration lay behind it, a veneration
touched with awe. It rose in his deepest thought that here was the first
hint of a symbolical representation. A symbol, sacred and inviolable,
belonging to some ancient worship that he half remembered in his soul,
stirred towards interpretation through all his being.

He lay there waiting, wondering vaguely where his two companions were,
yet fear all vanished because he felt attuned to a scale of things too
big to mate with definite dread. There was high anticipation in him, but
not anxiety. Of himself, as Felix Henriot, indeed, he hardly seemed
aware. He was some one else. Or, rather, he was himself at a stage he
had known once far, far away in a remote pre-existence. He watched
himself from dim summits of a Past, of which no further details were as
yet recoverable.

Pencil and sketching-block lay ready to his hand. The moon rose higher,
tucking the shadows ever more closely against the precipices. The silver
passed into a sheet of snowy whiteness, that made every boulder clearly
visible. Solemnity deepened everywhere into awe. The Wadi fled silently
down the stream of hours. It was almost empty now. And then, abruptly,
he was aware of change. The motion altered somewhere. It moved more
quietly; pace slackened; the end of the procession that evacuated the
depth and length of it went trailing past and turned the distant bend.

"It's slowing up," he whispered, as sure of it as though he had watched
a regiment of soldiers filing by. The wind took off his voice like a
flying feather of sound.

And there _was_ a change. It had begun. Night and the moon stood still
to watch and listen. The wind dropped utterly away. The sand ceased its
shifting movement. The Desert everywhere stopped still, and turned.

Some curtain, then, that for centuries had veiled the world, drew
softly up, leaving a shaded vista down which the eyes of his soul peered
towards long-forgotten pictures. Still buried by the sands too deep for
full recovery, he yet perceived dim portions of them--things once
honoured and loved passionately. For once they had surely been to him
the whole of life, not merely a fragment for cheap wonder to inspect.
And they were curiously familiar, even as the person of