this woman who
now evoked them was familiar. Henriot made no pretence to more definite
remembrance; but the haunting certainty rushed over him, deeper than
doubt or denial, and with such force that he felt no effort to destroy
it. Some lost sweetness of spiritual ambitions, lived for with this
passionate devotion, and passionately worshipped as men to-day worship
fame and money, revived in him with a tempest of high glory. Centres of
memory stirred from an age-long sleep, so that he could have wept at
their so complete obliteration hitherto. That such majesty had departed
from the world as though it never had existed, was a thought for
desolation and for tears. And though the little fragment he was about to
witness might be crude in itself and incomplete, yet it was part of a
vast system that once explored the richest realms of deity. The
reverence in him contained a holiness of the night and of the stars;
great, gentle awe lay in it too; for he stood, aflame with anticipation
and humility, at the gateway of sacred things.

And this was the mood, no thrill of cheap excitement or alarm to weaken
in, in which he first became aware that two spots of darkness he had
taken all along for boulders on the snowy valley bed, were actually
something very different. They were living figures. They moved. It was
not the shadows slowly following the moonlight, but the stir of human
beings who all these hours had been motionless as stone. He must have
passed them unnoticed within a dozen yards when he crossed the Wadi bed,
and a hundred times from this very ledge his eyes had surely rested on
them without recognition. Their minds, he knew full well, had not been
inactive as their bodies. The important part of the ancient ritual lay,
he remembered, in the powers of the evoking mind.

Here, indeed, was no effective nor theatrical approach of the principal
figures. It had nothing in common with the cheap external ceremonial of
modern days. In forgotten powers of the soul its grandeur lay, potent,
splendid, true. Long before he came, perhaps all through the day, these
two had laboured with their arduous preparations. They were there, part
of the Desert, when hours ago he had crossed the plateau in the
twilight. To them--to this woman's potent working of old ceremonial--had
been due that singular rush of imagination he had felt. He had
interpreted the Desert as alive. Here was the explanation. It _was_
alive. Life was on the way. Long lat