. Night screened it; Helouan, as the whole of modern
experience, stood in front of the screen. This thing took place behind
it. He crouched motionless, watching in some reconstructed ante-chamber
of the soul's pre-existence, while the torrent grew into a veritable
tempest.

Yet Night remained unshaken; the veil of moonlight did not quiver; the
stars dropped their slender golden pillars unobstructed. Calmness
reigned everywhere as before. The stupendous representation passed on
behind it all.

But the dignity of the little human movements that he watched had become
now indescribable. The gestures of the arms and bodies invested
themselves with consummate grandeur, as these two strode into the
caverns behind manifested life and drew forth symbols that represented
vanished Powers. The sound of their chanting voices broke in cadenced
fragments against the shores of language. The words Henriot never
actually caught, if words they were; yet he understood their
purport--these Names of Power to which the type of returning life gave
answer as they approached. He remembered fumbling for his drawing
materials, with such violence, however, that the pencil snapped in two
between his fingers as he touched it. For now, even here, upon the outer
fringe of the ceremonial ground, there was a stir of forces that set the
very muscles working in him before he had become aware of it....

Then came the moment when his heart leaped against his ribs with a
sudden violence that was almost pain, standing a second later still as
death. The lines upon the valley floor ceased their maze-like dance. All
movement stopped. Sound died away. In the midst of this profound and
dreadful silence the sigils lay empty there below him. They waited to be
in-formed. For the moment of entrance had come at last. Life was close.

And he understood why this return of life had all along suggested a
Procession and could be no mere momentary flash of vision. From such
appalling distance did it sweep down towards the present.

Upon this network, then, of splendid lines, at length held rigid, the
entire Desert reared itself with walls of curtained sand, that dwarfed
the cliffs, the shouldering hills, the very sky. The Desert stood on
end. As once before he had dreamed it from his balcony windows, it rose
upright, towering, and close against his face. It built sudden ramparts
to the stars that chambered the thing he witnessed behind walls no
centuries could ever bring