“And—­to obtain this form or outline?” he began; “to fix it, rather?”

“Would be required the clever pencil of a fearless looker-on—­some one not engaged in the actual evocation.  This form, accurately made permanent in solid matter, say in stone, would provide a channel always open.  Experiment, properly speaking, might then begin.  The cisterns of Power behind would be accessible.”

“An amazing proposition!” Henriot exclaimed.  What surprised him was that he felt no desire to laugh, and little even to doubt.

“Yet known to every religion that ever deserved the name,” put in Vance like a voice from a distance.  Blackness came somehow with his interruption—­a touch of darkness.  He spoke eagerly.

To all the talk that followed, and there was much of it, Henriot listened with but half an ear.  This one idea stormed through him with an uproar that killed attention.  Judgment was held utterly in abeyance.  He carried away from it some vague suggestion that this woman had hinted at previous lives she half remembered, and that every year she came to Egypt, haunting the sands and temples in the effort to recover lost clues.  And he recalled afterwards that she said, “This all came to me as a child, just as though it was something half remembered.”  There was the further suggestion that he himself was not unknown to her; that they, too, had met before.  But this, compared to the grave certainty of the rest, was merest fantasy that did not hold his attention.  He answered, hardly knowing what he said.  His preoccupation with other thoughts deep down was so intense, that he was probably barely polite, uttering empty phrases, with his mind elsewhere.  His one desire was to escape and be alone, and it was with genuine relief that he presently excused himself and went upstairs to bed.  The halls, he noticed, were empty; an Arab servant waited to put the lights out.  He walked up, for the lift had long ceased running.

And the magic of old Egypt stalked beside him.  The studies that had fascinated his mind in earlier youth returned with the power that had subdued his mind in boyhood.  The cult of Osiris woke in his blood again; Horus and Nephthys stirred in their long-forgotten centres.  There revived in him, too long buried, the awful glamour of those liturgal rites and vast body of observances, those spells and formulae of incantation of the oldest known recension that years ago had captured his imagination and belief—­the Book of the Dead.  Trumpet voices called to his heart again across the desert of some dim past.  There were forms of life—­impulses from the Creative Power which is the Universe—­other than the soul of man.  They could be known.  A spiritual exaltation, roused by the words and presence of this singular woman, shouted to him as he went.

Then, as he closed his bedroom door, carefully locking it, there stood beside him—­Vance.  The forgotten figure of Vance came up close—­the watching eyes, the simulated interest, the feigned belief, the detective mental attitude, these broke through the grandiose panorama, bringing darkness.  Vance, strong personality that hid behind assumed nonentity for some purpose of his own, intruded with sudden violence, demanding an explanation of his presence.