in this fragment of
ancient worship, he could remember nothing more. Somewhere lay a little
spot of streets and houses; its name escaped him. He had once been
there; there were many people, but insignificant people. Who were they?
And what had he to do with them? All recent memories had been drowned in
the tide that flooded him from an immeasurable Past.

And who were they--these two beings, standing on the white floor of sand
below him? For a long time he could not recover their names. Yet he
remembered them; and, thus robbed of association that names bring, he
saw them for an instant naked, and knew that one of them was evil. One
of them was vile. Blackness touched the picture there. The man, his name
still out of reach, was sinister, impure and dark at the heart. And for
this reason the evocation had been partial only. The admixture of an
evil motive was the flaw that marred complete success.

The names then flashed upon him--Lady Statham--Richard
Vance.

Vance! With a horrid drop from splendour into something mean
and sordid, Henriot felt the pain of it. The motive of the man was
so insignificant, his purpose so atrocious. More and more, with the
name, came back--his first repugnance, fear, suspicion. And human
terror caught him. He shrieked. But, as in nightmare, no sound escaped
his lips. He tried to move; a wild desire to interfere, to protect,
to prevent, flung him forward--close to the dizzy edge of the
gulf below. But his muscles refused obedience to the will. The
paralysis of common fear rooted him to the rocks.

But the sudden change of focus instantly destroyed the picture;
and so vehement was the fall from glory into meanness, that it dislocated
the machinery of clairvoyant vision. The inner perception
clouded and grew dark. Outer and inner mingled in violent, inextricable
confusion. The wrench seemed almost physical. It happened
all at once, retreat and continuation for a moment somehow combined.
And, if he did not definitely see the awful thing, at least he
was aware that it had come to pass. He knew it as positively as
though his eye were glued against a magnifying lens in the stillness
of some laboratory. He witnessed it.

The supreme moment of evocation was close. Life, through that
awful sandy vortex, whirled and raged. Loose particles showered
and pelted, caught by the draught of vehement life that moulded the
substance of the Desert into imperial outline--when, suddenly, shot
the little evil