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—­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