He tried to steady his mind upon familiar objects, but wherever he looked Sand stared him in the face.  Outside these trivial walls the Desert lay listening.  It lay waiting too.  Vance himself had dropped out of recognition.  He belonged to the world of things to-day.  But this woman and himself stood thousands of years away, beneath the columns of a Temple in the sands.  And the sands were moving.  His feet went shifting with them ... running down vistas of ageless memory that woke terror by their sheer immensity of distance....

Like a muffled voice that called to him through many veils and wrappings, he heard her describe the stupendous Powers that evocation might coax down again among the world of men.

“To what useful end?” he asked at length, amazed at his own temerity, and because he knew instinctively the answer in advance.  It rose through these layers of coiling memory in his soul.

“The extension of spiritual knowledge and the widening of life,” she answered.  “The link with the ‘unearthly kingdom’ wherein this ancient system went forever searching, would be re-established.  Complete rehabilitation might follow.  Portions—­little portions of these Powers—­expressed themselves naturally once in certain animal types, instinctive life that did not deny or reject them.  The worship of sacred animals was the relic of a once gigantic system of evocation—­not of monsters,” and she smiled sadly, “but of Powers that were willing and ready to descend when worship summoned them.”

Again, beneath his breath, Henriot heard himself murmur—­his own voice startled him as he whispered it:  “Actual bodily shape and outline?”

“Material for bodies is everywhere,” she answered, equally low; “dust to which we all return; sand, if you prefer it, fine, fine sand.  Life moulds it easily enough, when that life is potent.”

A certain confusion spread slowly through his mind as he heard her.  He lit a cigarette and smoked some minutes in silence.  Lady Statham and her nephew waited for him to speak.  At length, after some inner battling and hesitation, he put the question that he knew they waited for.  It was impossible to resist any longer.

“It would be interesting to know the method,” he said, “and to revive, perhaps, by experiment—­”

Before he could complete his thought, she took him up: 

“There are some who claim to know it,” she said gravely—­her eyes a moment masterful.  “A clue, thus followed, might lead to the entire reconstruction I spoke of.”

“And the method?” he repeated faintly.

“Evoke the Power by ceremonial evocation—­the ritual is obtainable—­and note the form it assumes.  Then establish it.  This shape or outline once secured, could then be made permanent—­a mould for its return at will—­its natural physical expression here on earth.”

“Idol!” he exclaimed.

“Image,” she replied at once.  “Life, before we can know it, must have a body.  Our souls, in order to manifest here, need a material vehicle.”