mists.  He hardly caught their meaning, so long it was since, he had known them; yet they were familiar as the faces seen in dreams, and some hint of their spiritual significance left faint traces in his heart by means of which their grandeur reached towards interpretation.  And all were symbols of a cosmic, deific nature; of Powers that only symbols can express—­prayer-books and sacraments used in the Wisdom Religion of an older time, but to-day known only in the decrepit, literal shell which is their degradation.

Grandly the figures moved across the valley bed.  The powers of the heavenly bodies once more joined them.  They moved to the measure of a cosmic dance, whose rhythm was creative.  The Universe partnered them.

There was this transfiguration of all common, external things.  He realised that appearances were visible letters of a soundless language, a language he once had known.  The powers of night and moon and desert sand married with points in the fluid stream of his inmost spiritual being that knew and welcomed them.  He understood.

Old Egypt herself stooped down from her uncovered throne.  The stars sent messengers.  There was commotion in the secret, sandy places of the desert.  For the Desert had grown Temple.  Columns reared against the sky.  There rose, from leagues away, the chanting of the sand.

The temples, where once this came to pass, were gone, their ruin questioned by alien hearts that knew not their spiritual meaning.  But here the entire Desert swept in to form a shrine, and the Majesty that once was Egypt stepped grandly back across ages of denial and neglect.  The sand was altar, and the stars were altar lights.  The moon lit up the vast recesses of the ceiling, and the wind from a thousand miles brought in the perfume of her incense.  For with that faith which shifts mountains from their sandy bed, two passionate, believing souls invoked the Ka of Egypt.

And the motions that they made, he saw, were definite harmonious patterns their dark figures traced upon the shining valley floor.  Like the points of compasses, with stems invisible, and directed from the sky, their movements marked the outlines of great signatures of power—­the sigils of the type of life they would evoke.  It would come as a Procession.  No individual outline could contain it.  It needed for its visible expression—­many.  The descent of a group-soul, known to the worship of this mighty system, rose from its lair of centuries and moved hugely down upon them.  The Ka, answering to the summons, would mate with sand.  The Desert was its Body.

Yet it was not this that he had come to fix with block and pencil.  Not yet was the moment when his skill might be of use.  He waited, watched, and listened, while this river of half-remembered things went past him.  The patterns grew beneath his eyes like music.  Too intricate and prolonged to remember with accuracy later, he understood that they were forms of that root-geometry which lies behind all manifested life.  The mould was being traced in outline.  Life would presently inform it.  And a singing rose from the maze of lines whose beauty was like the beauty of the constellations.