“We saw you there—­in the Wadi Hof,” put in Vance, suddenly breaking his long silence; “you too sleep out, then?  It means, you know, the Valley of Fear.”

“We wondered—­” It was Lady Statham’s voice, and she leaned forward eagerly as she said it, then abruptly left the sentence incomplete.  Henriot started; a sense of momentary acute discomfort again ran over him.  The same second she continued, though obviously changing the phrase—­“we wondered how you spent your day there, during the heat.  But you paint, don’t you?  You draw, I mean?”

The commonplace question, he realised in every fibre of his being, meant something they deemed significant.  Was it his talent for drawing that they sought to use him for?  Even as he answered with a simple affirmative, he had a flash of intuition that might be fanciful, yet that might be true:  that this extraordinary pair were intent upon some ceremony of evocation that should summon into actual physical expression some Power—­some type of life—­known long ago to ancient worship, and that they even sought to fix its bodily outline with the pencil—­his pencil.

A gateway of incredible adventure opened at his feet.  He balanced on the edge of knowing unutterable things.  Here was a clue that might lead him towards the hidden Egypt he had ever craved to know.  An awful hand was beckoning.  The sands were shifting.  He saw the million eyes of the Desert watching him from beneath the level lids of centuries.  Speck by speck, and grain by grain, the sand that smothered memory lifted the countless wrappings that embalmed it.

And he was willing, yet afraid.  Why in the world did he hesitate and shrink?  Why was it that the presence of this silent, watching personality in the chair beside him kept caution still alive, with warning close behind?  The pictures in his mind were gorgeously coloured.  It was Richard Vance who somehow streaked them through with black.  A thing of darkness, born of this man’s unassertive presence, flitted ever across the scenery, marring its grandeur with something evil, petty, dreadful.  He held a horrible thought alive.  His mind was thinking venal purposes.

In Henriot himself imagination had grown curiously heated, fed by what had been suggested rather than actually said.  Ideas of immensity crowded his brain, yet never assumed definite shape.  They were familiar, even as this strange woman was familiar.  Once, long ago, he had known them well; had even practised them beneath these bright Egyptian stars.  Whence came this prodigious glad excitement in his heart, this sense of mighty Powers coaxed down to influence the very details of daily life?  Behind them, for all their vagueness, lay an archetypal splendour, fraught with forgotten meanings.  He had always been aware of it in this mysterious land, but it had ever hitherto eluded him.  It hovered everywhere.  He had felt it brooding behind the towering Colossi at Thebes, in the skeletons of wasted temples, in the uncouth comeliness of the Sphinx, and in the crude terror of the Pyramids even.  Over the whole of Egypt hung its invisible wings.  These were but isolated fragments of the Body that might express it.  And the Desert remained its cleanest, truest symbol.  Sand knew it closest.  Sand might even give it bodily form and outline.