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 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.