Here, indeed, was no effective nor theatrical approach of the principal figures.  It had nothing in common with the cheap external ceremonial of modern days.  In forgotten powers of the soul its grandeur lay, potent, splendid, true.  Long before he came, perhaps all through the day, these two had laboured with their arduous preparations.  They were there, part of the Desert, when hours ago he had crossed the plateau in the twilight.  To them—­to this woman’s potent working of old ceremonial—­had been due that singular rush of imagination he had felt.  He had interpreted the Desert as alive.  Here was the explanation.  It was alive.  Life was on the way.  Long latent, her intense desire summoned it back to physical expression; and the effect upon him had steadily increased as he drew nearer to the centre where she would focus its revival and return.  Those singular impressions of being watched and accompanied were explained.  A priest of this old-world worship performed a genuine evocation; a Great One of Vision revived the cosmic Powers.

Henriot watched the small figures far below him with a sense of dramatic splendour that only this association of far-off Memory could account for.  It was their rising now, and the lifting of their arms to form a slow revolving outline, that marked the abrupt cessation of the larger river of movement; for the sweeping of the Wadi sank into sudden stillness, and these two, with motions not unlike some dance of deliberate solemnity, passed slowly through the moonlight to and fro.  His attention fixed upon them both.  All other movement ceased.  They fastened the flow of Time against the Desert’s body.

What happened then?  How could his mind interpret an experience so long denied that the power of expression, as of comprehension, has ceased to exist?  How translate this symbolical representation, small detail though it was, of a transcendent worship entombed for most so utterly beyond recovery?  Its splendour could never lodge in minds that conceive Deity perched upon a cloud within telephoning distance of fashionable churches.  How should he phrase it even to himself, whose memory drew up pictures from so dim a past that the language fit to frame them lay unreachable and lost?

Henriot did not know.  Perhaps he never yet has known.  Certainly, at the time, he did not even try to think.  His sensations remain his own—­untranslatable; and even that instinctive description the mind gropes for automatically, floundered, halted, and stopped dead.  Yet there rose within him somewhere, from depths long drowned in slumber, a reviving power by which he saw, divined and recollected—­remembered seemed too literal a word—­these elements of a worship he once had personally known.  He, too, had worshipped thus.  His soul had moved amid similar evocations in some aeonian past, whence now the sand was being cleared away.  Symbols of stupendous meaning flashed and went their way across the lifting