For Felix Henriot, with his admixture of foreign blood, was philosopher as well as vagabond, a strong poetic and religious strain sometimes breaking out through fissures in his complex nature.  He had seen much life; had read many books.  The passionate desire of youth to solve the world’s big riddles had given place to a resignation filled to the brim with wonder.  Anything might be true.  Nothing surprised him.  The most outlandish beliefs, for all he knew, might fringe truth somewhere.  He had escaped that cheap cynicism with which disappointed men soothe their vanity when they realise that an intelligible explanation of the universe lies beyond their powers.  He no longer expected final answers.

For him, even the smallest journeys held the spice of some adventure; all minutes were loaded with enticing potentialities.  And they shaped for themselves somehow a dramatic form.  “It’s like a story,” his friends said when he told his travels.  It always was a story.

But the adventure that lay waiting for him where the silent streets of little Helouan kiss the great Desert’s lips, was of a different kind to any Henriot had yet encountered.  Looking back, he has often asked himself, “How in the world can I accept it?”

And, perhaps, he never yet has accepted it.  It was sand that brought it.  For the Desert, the stupendous thing that mothers little Helouan, produced it.

II

He slipped through Cairo with the same relief that he left the Riviera, resenting its social vulgarity so close to the imperial aristocracy of the Desert; he settled down into the peace of soft and silent little Helouan.  The hotel in which he had a room on the top floor had been formerly a Khedivial Palace.  It had the air of a palace still.  He felt himself in a country-house, with lofty ceilings, cool and airy corridors, spacious halls.  Soft-footed Arabs attended to his wants; white walls let in light and air without a sign of heat; there was a feeling of a large, spread tent pitched on the very sand; and the wind that stirred the oleanders in the shady gardens also crept in to rustle the palm leaves of his favourite corner seat.  Through the large windows where once the Khedive held high court, the sunshine blazed upon vistaed leagues of Desert.

And from his bedroom windows he watched the sun dip into gold and crimson behind the swelling Libyan sands.  This side of the pyramids he saw the Nile meander among palm groves and tilled fields.  Across his balcony railings the Egyptian stars trooped down beside his very bed, shaping old constellations for his dreams; while, to the south, he looked out upon the vast untamable Body of the sands that carpeted the world for thousands of miles towards Upper Egypt, Nubia, and the dread Sahara itself.  He wondered again why people thought it necessary to go so far afield to know the Desert.  Here, within half an hour of Cairo, it lay breathing solemnly at his very doors.