down crumbling into dust.

He himself, in some curious fashion, lay just outside, viewing it apart.
As from a pinnacle, he peered within--peered down with straining eyes
into the vast picture-gallery Memory threw abruptly open. And the
picture spaced its noble outline thus against the very stars. He gazed
between columns, that supported the sky itself, like pillars of sand
that swept across the field of vanished years. Sand poured and streamed
aside, laying bare the Past.

For down the enormous vista into which he gazed, as into an avenue
running a million miles towards a tiny point, he saw this moving Thing
that came towards him, shaking loose the countless veils of sand the
ages had swathed about it. The Ka of buried Egypt wakened out of sleep.
She had heard the potent summons of her old, time-honoured ritual. She
came. She stretched forth an arm towards the worshippers who evoked her.
Out of the Desert, out of the leagues of sand, out of the immeasurable
wilderness which was her mummied Form and Body, she rose and came. And
this fragment of her he would actually see--this little portion that was
obedient to the stammered and broken ceremonial. The partial revelation
he would witness--yet so vast, even this little bit of it, that it came
as a Procession and a host.

For a moment there was nothing. And then the voice of the woman rose in
a resounding cry that filled the Wadi to its furthest precipices, before
it died away again to silence. That a human voice could produce such
volume, accent, depth, seemed half incredible. The walls of towering
sand swallowed it instantly. But the Procession of life, needing a
group, a host, an army for its physical expression, reached at that
moment the nearer end of the huge avenue. It touched the Present; it
entered the world of men.

X

The entire range of Henriot's experience, read, imagined, dreamed, then
fainted into unreality before the sheer wonder of what he saw. In the
brief interval it takes to snap the fingers the climax was thus so
hurriedly upon him. And, through it all, he was clearly aware of the
pair of little human figures, man and woman, standing erect and
commanding at the centre--knew, too, that she directed and controlled,
while he in some secondary fashion supported her--and ever watched. But
both were dim, dropped somewhere into a lesser scale. It was the
knowledge of their presence, however, that alone enabled him to keep his
powers in hand at a