t was the moment when his skill might be of use. He waited, watched,
and listened, while this river of half-remembered things went past him.
The patterns grew beneath his eyes like music. Too intricate and
prolonged to remember with accuracy later, he understood that they were
forms of that root-geometry which lies behind all manifested life. The
mould was being traced in outline. Life would presently inform it. And a
singing rose from the maze of lines whose beauty was like the beauty of
the constellations.

This sound was very faint at first, but grew steadily in volume.
Although no echoes, properly speaking, were possible, these precipices
caught stray notes that trooped in from the further sandy reaches. The
figures certainly were chanting, but their chanting was not all he
heard. Other sounds came to his ears from far away, running past him
through the air from every side, and from incredible distances, all
flocking down into the Wadi bed to join the parent note that summoned
them. The Desert was giving voice. And memory, lifting her hood yet
higher, showed more of her grey, mysterious face that searched his soul
with questions. Had he so soon forgotten that strange union of form and
sound which once was known to the evocative rituals of olden days?

Henriot tried patiently to disentangle this desert-music that their
intoning voices woke, from the humming of the blood in his own veins.
But he succeeded only in part. Sand was already in the air. There was
reverberation, rhythm, measure; there was almost the breaking of the
stream into great syllables. But was it due, this strange reverberation,
to the countless particles of sand meeting in mid-air about him, or--to
larger bodies, whose surfaces caught this friction of the sand and threw
it back against his ears? The wind, now rising, brought particles that
stung his face and hands, and filled his eyes with a minute fine dust
that partially veiled the moonlight. But was not something larger,
vaster these particles composed now also on the way?

Movement and sound and flying sand thus merged themselves more and more
in a single, whirling torrent. But Henriot sought no commonplace
explanation of what he witnessed; and here was the proof that all
happened in some vestibule of inner experience where the strain of
question and answer had no business. One sitting beside him need not
have seen anything at all. His host, for instance, from Helouan, need
not have been aware