and
even in the mass of Desert which provided their foundation. The hinges
of the Sand went creaking in the night. It shaped for itself a bodily
outline.

Yet, most strangely, nothing definitely moved. How could he express the
violent contradiction? For the immobility was apparent only--a sham, a
counterfeit; while behind it the essential _being_ of these things did
rush and shift and alter. He saw the two things side by side: the outer
immobility the senses commonly agree upon, _and_ this amazing flying-out
of their inner, invisible substance towards the vortex of attracting
life that sucked them in. For stubborn matter turned docile before the
stress of this returning life, taught somewhere to be plastic. It was
being moulded into an approach to bodily outline. A mobile elasticity
invaded rigid substance. The two officiating human beings, safe at the
stationary centre, and himself, just outside the circle of operation,
alone remained untouched and unaffected. But a few feet in any
direction, for any one of them, meant--instantaneous death. They would
be absorbed into the vortex, mere corpuscles pressed into the service of
this sphere of action of a mighty Body....

How these perceptions reached him with such conviction, Henriot could
never say. He knew it, because he _felt_ it. Something fell about him
from the sky that already paled towards the dawn. The stars themselves,
it seemed, contributed some part of the terrific, flowing impulse that
conquered matter and shaped itself this physical expression.

Then, before he was able to fashion any preconceived idea of what
visible form this potent life might assume, he was aware of further
change. It came at the briefest possible interval after the
beginning--this certainty that, to and fro about him, as yet however
indeterminate, passed Magnitudes that were stupendous as the desert.
There was beauty in them too, though a terrible beauty hardly of this
earth at all. A fragment of old Egypt had returned--a little portion of
that vast Body of Belief that once was Egypt. Evoked by the worship of
one human heart, passionately sincere, the Ka of Egypt stepped back to
visit the material it once informed--the Sand.

Yet only a portion came. Henriot clearly realised that. It stretched
forth an arm. Finding no mass of worshippers through whom it might
express itself completely, it pressed inanimate matter thus into its
service.

Here was the beginning the woman had spoken of