For the transformation of the Desert now began in earnest.  It grew apace.  Before he had gone the first two miles of his hour’s journey, the twilight caught the rocky hills and twisted them into those monstrous revelations of physiognomies they barely take the trouble to conceal even in the daytime.  And, while he well understood the eroding agencies that have produced them, there yet rose in his mind a deeper interpretation lurking just behind their literal meanings.  Here, through the motionless surfaces, that nameless thing the Desert ill conceals urged outwards into embryonic form and shape, akin, he almost felt, to those immense deific symbols of Other Life the Egyptians knew and worshipped.  Hence, from the Desert, had first come, he felt, the unearthly life they typified in their monstrous figures of granite, evoked in their stately temples, and communed with in the ritual of their Mystery ceremonials.

This “watching” aspect of the Libyan Desert is really natural enough; but it is just the natural, Henriot knew, that brings the deepest revelations.  The surface limestones, resisting the erosion, block themselves ominously against the sky, while the softer sand beneath sets them on altared pedestals that define their isolation splendidly.  Blunt and unconquerable, these masses now watched him pass between them.  The Desert surface formed them, gave them birth.  They rose, they saw, they sank down again—­waves upon a sea that carried forgotten life up from the depths below.  Of forbidding, even menacing type, they somewhere mated with genuine grandeur.  Unformed, according to any standard of human or of animal faces, they achieved an air of giant physiognomy which made them terrible.  The unwinking stare of eyes—­lidless eyes that yet ever succeed in hiding—­looked out under well-marked, level eyebrows, suggesting a vision that included the motives and purposes of his very heart.  They looked up grandly, understood why he was there, and then—­slowly withdrew their mysterious, penetrating gaze.

The strata built them so marvellously up; the heavy, threatening brows; thick lips, curved by the ages into a semblance of cold smiles; jowls drooping into sandy heaps that climbed against the cheeks; protruding jaws, and the suggestion of shoulders just about to lift the entire bodies out of the sandy beds—­this host of countenances conveyed a solemnity of expression that seemed everlasting, implacable as Death.  Of human signature they bore no trace, nor was comparison possible between their kind and any animal life.  They peopled the Desert here.  And their smiles, concealed yet just discernible, went broadening with the darkness into a Desert laughter.  The silence bore it underground.  But Henriot was aware of it.  The troop of faces slipped into that single, enormous countenance which is the visage of the Sand.  And he saw it everywhere, yet nowhere.