“A sack like that is the wonder of the world,” he laughed again, kicking the unwieldy, sausage-shaped monster into a corner of the room, and sitting down to write the thrilling labels:  “Felix Henriot, Alexandria via Marseilles.”  But his pen blotted the letters; there was sand in it.  He rewrote the words.  Then he remembered a dozen things he had left out.  Impatiently, yet with confusion somewhere, he stuffed them in.  They ran away into shifting heaps; they disappeared; they emerged suddenly again.  It was like packing hot, dry, flowing sand.  From the pockets of a coat—­he had worn it last summer down Dorset way—­out trickled sand.  There was sand in his mind and thoughts.

And his dreams that night were full of winds, the old sad winds of Egypt, and of moving, sifting sand.  Arabs and Afreets danced amazingly together across dunes he could never reach.  For he could not follow fast enough.  Something infinitely older than these ever caught his feet and held him back.  A million tiny fingers stung and pricked him.  Something flung a veil before his eyes.  Once it touched him—­his face and hands and neck.  “Stay here with us,” he heard a host of muffled voices crying, but their sound was smothered, buried, rising through the ground.  A myriad throats were choked.  Till, at last, with a violent effort he turned and seized it.  And then the thing he grasped at slipped between his fingers and ran easily away.  It had a grey and yellow face, and it moved through all its parts.  It flowed as water flows, and yet was solid.  It was centuries old.

He cried out to it.  “Who are you?  What is your name?  I surely know you ... but I have forgotten ...?”

And it stopped, turning from far away its great uncovered countenance of nameless colouring.  He caught a voice.  It rolled and boomed and whispered like the wind.  And then he woke, with a curious shaking in his heart, and a little touch of chilly perspiration on the skin.

But the voice seemed in the room still—­close beside him: 

“I am the Sand,” he heard, before it died away.

* * * * *

And next he realised that the glitter of Paris lay behind him, and a steamer was taking him with much unnecessary motion across a sparkling sea towards Alexandria.  Gladly he saw the Riviera fade below the horizon, with its hard bright sunshine, treacherous winds, and its smear of rich, conventional English.  All restlessness now had left him.  True vagabond still at forty, he only felt the unrest and discomfort of life when caught in the network of routine and rigid streets, no chance of breaking loose.  He was off again at last, money scarce enough indeed, but the joy of wandering expressing itself in happy emotions of release.  Every warning of calculation was stifled.  He thought of the American woman who walked out of her Long Island house one summer’s day to look at a passing sail—­and was gone eight years before she walked in again.  Eight years of roving travel!  He had always felt respect and admiration for that woman.