“These Powers, you suggest, then—­their Kas, as it were—­may still—­”

But she waved aside the interruption.  “They are satisfied, as the common people were, with a degraded literalism,” she went on.  “Nut was the Heavens, who spread herself across the earth in the form of a woman; Shu, the vastness of space; the ibis typified Thoth, and Hathor was the Patron of the Western Hills; Khonsu, the moon, was personified, as was the deity of the Nile.  But the high priest of Ra, the sun, you notice, remained ever the Great One of Visions.”

The High Priest, the Great One of Visions!—­How wonderfully again she made the sentence sing.  She put splendour into it.  The pictures shifted suddenly closer in his mind.  He saw the grandeur of Memphis and Heliopolis rise against the stars and shake the sand of ages from their stern old temples.

“You think it possible, then, to get into touch with these High Powers you speak of, Powers once manifested in common forms?”

Henriot asked the question with a degree of conviction and solemnity that surprised himself.  The scenery changed about him as he listened.  The spacious halls of this former khedivial Palace melted into Desert spaces.  He smelt the open wilderness, the sand that haunted Helouan.  The soft-footed Arab servants moved across the hall in their white sheets like eddies of dust the wind stirred from the Libyan dunes.  And over these two strangers close beside him stole a queer, indefinite alteration.  Moods and emotions, nameless as unknown stars, rose through his soul, trailing dark mists of memory from unfathomable distances.

Lady Statham answered him indirectly.  He found himself wishing that those steady eyes would sometimes close.

“Love is known only by feeling it,” she said, her voice deepening a little.  “Behind the form you feel the person loved.  The process is an evocation, pure and simple.  An arduous ceremonial, involving worship and devotional preparation, is the means.  It is a difficult ritual—­the only one acknowledged by the world as still effectual.  Ritual is the passage way of the soul into the Infinite.”

He might have said the words himself.  The thought lay in him while she uttered it.  Evocation everywhere in life was as true as assimilation.  Nevertheless, he stared his companion full in the eyes with a touch of almost rude amazement.  But no further questions prompted themselves; or, rather, he declined to ask them.  He recalled, somehow uneasily, that in ceremonial the points of the compass have significance, standing for forces and activities that sleep there until invoked, and a passing light fell upon that curious midnight request in the corridor upstairs.  These two were on the track of undesirable experiments, he thought....  They wished to include him too.

“You go at night sometimes into the Desert?” he heard himself saying.  It was impulsive and miscalculated.  His feeling that it would be wise to change the conversation resulted in giving it fresh impetus instead.