--little opening clue.
Entire reconstruction lay perhaps beyond.

And Henriot next realised that these Magnitudes in which this
group-energy sought to clothe itself as visible form, were curiously
familiar. It was not a new thing that he would see. Booming softly as
they dropped downwards through the sky, with a motion the size of them
rendered delusive, they trooped up the Avenue towards the central point
that summoned them. He realised the giant flock of them--descent of
fearful beauty--outlining a type of life denied to the world for ages,
countless as this sand that blew against his skin. Careering over the
waste of Desert moved the army of dark Splendours, that dwarfed any
organic structure called a body men have ever known. He recognised them,
cold in him of death, though the outlines reared higher than the
pyramids, and towered up to hide whole groups of stars. Yes, he
recognised them in their partial revelation, though he never saw the
monstrous host complete. But, one of them, he realised, posing its
eternal riddle to the sands, had of old been glimpsed sufficiently to
seize its form in stone,--yet poorly seized, as a doll may stand for the
dignity of a human being or a child's toy represent an engine that draws
trains....

And he knelt there on his narrow ledge, the world of men forgotten. The
power that caught him was too great a thing for wonder or for fear; he
even felt no awe. Sensation of any kind that can be named or realised
left him utterly. He forgot himself. He merely watched. The glory numbed
him. Block and pencil, as the reason of his presence there at all, no
longer existed....

Yet one small link remained that held him to some kind of consciousness
of earthly things: he never lost sight of this--that, being just outside
the circle of evocation, he was safe, and that the man and woman, being
stationary in its untouched centre, were also safe. But--that a movement
of six inches in any direction meant for any one of them instant death.

What was it, then, that suddenly strengthened this solitary link so that
the chain tautened and he felt the pull of it? Henriot could not say. He
came back with the rush of a descending drop to the realisation--dimly,
vaguely, as from great distance--that he was with these two, now at this
moment, in the Wadi Hof, and that the cold of dawn was in the air about
him. The chill breath of the Desert made him shiver.

But at first, so deeply had his soul been dipped