V
A DESERT EPISODE
1
"Better put wraps on now. The sun's getting low," a girl said.
It was the end of a day's expedition in the Arabian Desert, and theywere having tea. A few yards away the donkeys munched their _barsim_;beside them in the sand the boys lay finishing bread and jam. Immense,with gliding tread, the sun's rays slid from crest to crest of thelimestone ridges that broke the huge expanse towards the Red Sea. Bythe time the tea-things were packed the sun hovered, a giant ball ofred, above the Pyramids. It stood in the western sky a moment, lookingout of its majestic hood across the sand. With a movement almostvisible it leaped, paused, then leaped again. It seemed to boundtowards the horizon; then, suddenly, was gone.
"It _is_ cold, yes," said the painter, Rivers. And all who heardlooked up at him because of the way he said it. A hurried movement ranthrough the merry party, and the girls were on their donkeys quickly,not wishing to be left to bring up the rear. They clattered off. Theboys cried; the thud of sticks was heard; hoofs shuffled through thesand and stones. In single file the picnickers headed for Helouan, somefive miles distant. And the desert closed up behind them as they went,following in a shadowy wave that never broke, noiseless, foamless,unstreaked, driven by no wind, and of a volume undiscoverable. Againstthe orange sunset the Pyramids turned deep purple. The strip of silveryNile among its palm trees looked like rising mist. In the incredibleEgyptian afterglow the enormous horizons burned a little longer, thenwent out. The ball of the earth--a huge round globe that bulged--curvedvisibly as at sea. It was no longer a flat expanse; it turned. Itssplendid curves were realised.
"Better put wraps on; it's cold and the sun is low"--and then thecurious hurry to get back among the houses and the haunts of men. Nomore was said, perhaps, than this, yet, the time and place being whatthey were, the mind became suddenly aware of that quality which everbrings a certain shrinking with it--vastness; and more than vastness:that which is endless because it is also beginningless--eternity. Acolossal splendour stole upon the heart, and the senses, unaccustomedto the unusual stretch, reeled a little, as though the wonder wasmore than could be faced with comfort. Not all, doubtless, realisedit, though to two, at least, it came with a staggering impact therewas no withstanding. For, while the luminous greys and purples creptround them from the sandy wastes, the hearts of these two becameaware of certain common things whose simple majesty is usually dulledby mere familiarity. Neither the man nor the girl knew for certainthat the other felt it, as they brought up the rear together; yetthe fact that each _did_ feel it set them side by side in the samestrange circle--and made them silent. They realised the immensity ofa moment: the dizzy stretch of time that led up to the casual pinningof a veil; to the tightening of a stirrup strap; to the little speechwith a companion; the roar of the vanished centuries that have groundmountains into sand and spread them over the floor of Africa; aboveall, to the little truth that they themselves existed amid the whirl ofstupendous systems all delicately balanced as a spider's web--that theywere _alive_.
For a moment this vast scale of reality revealed itself, thenhid swiftly again behind the debris of the obvious. The universe,containing their two tiny yet important selves, stood still for aninstant before their eyes. They looked at it--realised that theybelonged to it. Everything moved and had its being, _lived_--here inthis silent, empty desert even more actively than in a city of crowdedhouses. The quiet Nile, sighing with age, passed down towards the sea;there loomed the menacing Pyramids across the twilight; beneath them,in monstrous dignity, crouched that Shadow from whose eyes of batteredstone proceeds the nameless thing that contracts the heart, then opensit again to terror; and everywhere, from towering monoliths as fromsecret tombs, rose that strange, long whisper which, defying time anddistance, laughs at death. The spell of Egypt, which is the spell ofimmortality, touched their hearts.
Already, as the group of picnickers rode homewards now, the firststars twinkled overhead, and the peerless Egyptian night was on theway. There was hurry in the passing of the dusk. And the cold sensiblyincreased.
"So you did no painting after all," said Rivers to the girl who rodea little in front of him, "for I never saw you touch your sketch-bookonce."
They were some distance now behind the others; the line straggled; andwhen no answer came he quickened his pace, drew up alongside and sawthat her eyes, in the reflection of the sunset, shone with moisture.But she turned her head a little, smiling into his face, so that thehuman and the non-human beauty came over him with an onset that wasalmost shock. Neither one nor other, he knew, were long for him, andthe realisation fell upon him with a pang of actual physical pain. Theacuteness, the hopelessness of the realisation, for a moment, were morethan he could bear, stern of temper though he was, and he tried to passin front of her, urging his donkey with resounding strokes. Her ownanimal, however, following the lead, at once came up with him.
"You felt it, perhaps, as I did," he said some moments later,his voice quite steady again. "The stupendous, everlastingthing--the--_life_ behind it all." He hesitated a little in his speech,unable to find the substantive that could compass even a fragment ofhis thought. She paused, too, similarly inarticulate before the surgeof incomprehensible feelings.
"It's--awful," she said, half laughing, yet the tone hushed and alittle quaver in it somewhere. And her voice to his was like the firstsound he had ever heard in the world, for the first sound a full-grownman heard in the world would be beyond all telling--magical. "I shallnot try again," she continued, leaving out the laughter this time; "mysketch-book is a farce. For, to tell the truth"--and the next threewords she said below her breath--"I dare not."
He turned and looked at her for a second. It seemed to him that thefollowing wave had caught them up, and was about to break above her,too. But the big-brimmed hat and the streaming veil shrouded herfeatures. He saw, instead, the Universe. He felt as though he andshe had always, always been together, and always, always would be.Separation was inconceivable.
"It came so close," she whispered. "It--shook me!"
They were cut off from their companions, whose voices sounded farahead. Her words might have been spoken by the darkness, or by some onewho peered at them from within that following wave. Yet the fancifulphrase was better than any he could find. From the immeasurable spaceof time and distance men's hearts vainly seek to plumb, it drew intocloser perspective a certain meaning that words may hardly compass,a formidable truth that belongs to that deep place where hope anddoubt fight their incessant battle. The awe she spoke of was theawe of immortality, of belonging to something that is endless andbeginningless.
And he understood that the tears and laughter were one--caused bythat spell which takes a little human life and shakes it, as an animalshakes its prey that later shall feed its blood and increase its powerof growth. His other thoughts--really but a single thought--he had notthe right to utter. Pain this time easily routed hope as the wave camenearer. For it was the wave of death that would shortly break, he knew,over him, but not over her. Him it would sweep with its huge withdrawalinto the desert whence it came: her it would leave high upon the shoresof life--alone. And yet the separation would somehow not be real. Theywere together in eternity even now. They were endless as this desert,beginningless as this sky ... immortal. The realisation overwhelmed....
The lights of Helouan seemed to come no nearer as they rode on insilence for the rest of the way. Against the dark background of theMokattam Hills these fairy lights twinkled brightly, hanging inmid-air, but after an hour they were no closer than before. It was likeriding towards the stars. It would take centuries to reach them. Therewere centuries in which to do so. Hurry has no place in the desert;it is born in streets. The desert stands still; to go fast in it isto go backwards. Now, in particular, its enormous, uncanny leisurewas everywhere--in keeping with that mighty scale the sunset had madevisible. His thoughts, like the steps of the weary animal that borehim, had no progress in them. The serpent of eternity
, holding its tailin its own mouth, rose from the sand, enclosing himself, the stars--andher. Behind him, in the hollows of that shadowy wave, the processionof dynasties and conquests, the great series of gorgeous civilisationsthe mind calls Past, stood still, crowded with shining eyes andbeckoning faces, still waiting to arrive. There is no death in Egypt.His own death stood so close that he could touch it by stretching outhis hand, yet it seemed as much behind as in front of him. What mancalled a beginning was a trick. There was no such thing. He was withthis girl--_now_, when Death waited so close for him--yet he had neverreally begun. Their lives ran always parallel. The hand he stretchedto clasp approaching death caught instead in this girl's shadowy hair,drawing her in with him to the centre where he breathed the eternityof the desert. Yet expression of any sort was as futile as it wasunnecessary. To paint, to speak, to sing, even the slightest gesture ofthe soul, became a crude and foolish thing. Silence was here the truth.And they rode in silence towards the fairy lights.
Then suddenly the rocky ground rose up close before them; bouldersstood out vividly with black shadows and shining heads; a flat-roofedhouse slid by; three palm trees rattled in the evening wind; beyond, amosque and minaret sailed upwards, like the spars and rigging of somephantom craft; and the colonnades of the great modern hotel, standingupon its dome of limestone ridge, loomed over them. Helouan was aboutthem before they knew it. The desert lay behind with its huge, arrestedbillow. Slowly, owing to its prodigious volume, yet with a speed thatmerged it instantly with the far horizon behind the night, this wavenow withdrew a little. There was no hurry. It came, for the moment, nofarther. Rivers knew. For he was in it to the throat. Only his headwas above the surface. He still could breathe--and speak--and see.Deepening with every hour into an incalculable splendour, it waited.
2
In the street the foremost riders drew rein, and, two and two abreast,the long line clattered past the shops and cafes, the railway stationand hotels, stared at by the natives from the busy pavements. Thedonkeys stumbled, blinded by the electric light. Girls in white dressesflitted here and there, arabiyehs rattled past with people hurryinghome to dress for dinner, and the evening train, just in from Cairo,disgorged its stream of passengers. There were dances in several of thehotels that night. Voices rose on all sides. Questions and answers,engagements and appointments were made, little plans and plots andintrigues for seizing happiness on the wing--before the wave rolled inand caught the lot. They chattered gaily:
"You _are_ going, aren't you? You promised----"
"Of course I am."
"Then I'll drive you over. May I call for you?"
"All right. Come at ten."
"We shan't have finished our bridge by then. Say ten-thirty."
And eyes exchanged their meaning signals. The group dismounted anddispersed. Arabs standing under the lebbekh trees, or squatting onthe pavements before their dim-lit booths, watched them with faces ofgleaming bronze. Rivers gave his bridle to a donkey-boy, and movedacross stiffly after the long ride to help the girl dismount. "You feeltired?" he asked gently. "It's been a long day." For her face was whiteas chalk, though the eyes shone brilliantly.
"Tired, perhaps," she answered, "but exhilarated too. I should like tobe there now. I should like to go back this minute--if some one wouldtake me." And, though she said it lightly, there was a meaning in hervoice he apparently chose to disregard. It was as if she knew hissecret. "Will you take me--some day soon?"
The direct question, spoken by those determined little lips, wasimpossible to ignore. He looked close into her face as he helped herfrom the saddle with a spring that brought her a moment half intohis arms. "Some day--soon. I will," he said with emphasis, "when youare--ready." The pallor in her face, and a certain expression in it hehad not known before, startled him. "I think you have been overdoingit," he added, with a tone in which authority and love were oddlymingled, neither of them disguised.
"Like yourself," she smiled, shaking her skirts out and looking down ather dusty shoes. "I've only a few days more--before I sail. We're bothin such a hurry, but you are the worst of the two."
"Because my time is even shorter," ran his horrified thought--for hesaid no word.
She raised her eyes suddenly to his, with an expression that for aninstant almost convinced him she had guessed--and the soul in himstood rigidly at attention, urging back the rising fires. The hair haddropped loosely round the sun-burned neck. Her face was level withhis shoulder. Even the glare of the street lights could not make herundesirable. But behind the gaze of the deep brown eyes another thinglooked forth imperatively into his own. And he recognised it with arush of terror, yet of singular exultation.
"It followed us all the way," she whispered. "It came after us from thedesert--where it _lives_."
"At the houses," he said equally low, "it stopped." He gladly adoptedher syncopated speech, for it helped him in his struggle to subduethose rising fires.
For a second she hesitated. "You mean, if we had not left so soon--whenit turned cold. If we had not hurried--if we had remained a littlelonger----"
He caught at her hand, unable to control himself, but dropped itagain the same second, while she made as though she had not noticed,forgiving him with her eyes. "Or a great deal longer," she addedslowly--"for ever?"
And then he was certain that she _had_ guessed--not that he loved herabove all else in the world, for that was so obvious that a child mightknow it, but that his silence was due to his other, lesser secret; thatthe great Executioner stood waiting to drop the hood about his eyes. Hewas already pinioned. Something in her gaze and in her manner persuadedhim suddenly that she understood.
His exhilaration increased extraordinarily. "I mean," he said veryquietly, "that the spell weakens here among the houses and amongthe--so-called living." There was masterfulness, triumph, in his voice.Very wonderfully he saw her smile change; she drew slightly closer tohis side, as though unable to resist. "Mingled with lesser things weshould not understand completely," he added softly.
"And that might be a mistake, you mean?" she asked quickly, her facegrave again.
It was his turn to hesitate a moment. The breeze stirred the hair abouther neck, bringing its faint perfume--perfume of young life--to hisnostrils. He drew his breath in deeply, smothering back the torrent ofrising words he knew were unpermissible. "Misunderstanding," he saidbriefly. "If the eye be single----" He broke off, shaken by a paroxysmof coughing. "You know my meaning," he continued, as soon as the attackhad passed; "you feel the difference _here_," pointing round him tothe hotels, the shops, the busy stream of people; "the hurry, theexcitement, the feverish, blinding child's play which pretends to bealive, but does not know it----" And again the coughing stopped him.This time she took his hand in her own, pressed it very slightly, thenreleased it. He felt it as the touch of that desert wave upon his soul."The reception must be in complete and utter resignation. Tainted bylesser things, the disharmony might be----" he began stammeringly.
Again there came interruption, as the rest of the party calledimpatiently to know if they were coming up to the hotel. He had nottime to find the completing adjective. Perhaps he could not find itever. Perhaps it does not exist in any modern language. Eternity is notrealised to-day; men have no time to know they are alive for ever; theyare too busy....
They all moved in a clattering, merry group towards the big hotel.Rivers and the girl were separated.
3
There was a dance that evening, but neither of these took part init. In the great dining-room their tables were far apart. He couldnot even see her across the sea of intervening heads and shoulders.The long meal over, he went to his room, feeling it imperative tobe alone. He did not read, he did not write; but, leaving the lightunlit, he wrapped himself up and leaned out upon the broad window-sillinto the great Egyptian night. His deep-sunken thoughts, like to thecrowding stars, stood still, yet for ever took new shapes. He triedto see behind them, as, when a boy, he had tried to see behind theconstellations--out into
space--where there is nothing.
Below him the lights of Helouan twinkled like the Pleiades reflected ina pool of water; a hum of queer soft noises rose to his ears; but justbeyond the houses the desert stood at attention, the vastest thing hehad ever known, very stern, yet very comforting, with its peace beyondall comprehension, its delicate, wild terror, and its awful messageof immortality. And the attitude of his mind, though he did not knowit, was one of prayer.... From time to time he went to lie on the bedwith paroxysms of coughing. He had overtaxed his strength--his swiftlyfading strength. The wave had risen to his lips.
Nearer forty than thirty-five, Paul Rivers had come out to Egypt,plainly understanding that with the greatest care he might last a fewweeks longer than if he stayed in England. A few more times to see thesunset and the sunrise, to watch the stars, feel the soft airs of earthupon his cheeks; a few more days of intercourse with his kind, askingand answering questions, wearing the old familiar clothes he loved,reading his favourite pages, and then--out into the big spaces--wherethere is nothing.
Yet no one, from his stalwart, energetic figure, would have guessed--noone but the expert mind, not to be deceived, to whom in the firstattack of overwhelming despair and desolation he went for final advice.He left that house, as many had left it before, knowing that soon hewould need no earthly protection of roof and walls, and that his soul,if it existed, would be shelterless in the space behind all manifestedlife. He had looked forward to fame and position in this world; had,indeed, already achieved the first step towards this end; and now,with the vanity of all earthly aims so mercilessly clear before him,he had turned, in somewhat of a nervous, concentrated hurry, to maketerms with the Infinite while still the brain was there. And had, ofcourse, found nothing. For it takes a lifetime crowded with experimentand effort to learn even the alphabet of genuine faith; and what couldcome of a few weeks' wild questioning but confusion and bewildermentof mind? It was inevitable. He came out to Egypt wondering, thinking,questioning, but chiefly wondering. He had grown, that is, morechildlike, abandoning the futile tool of Reason, which hitherto hadseemed to him the perfect instrument. Its foolishness stood nakedbefore him in the pitiless light of the specialist's decision.For--"Who can by searching find out God?"
To be exceedingly careful of over-exertion was the final warning hebrought with him, and, within a few hours of his arrival, three weeksago, he had met this girl and utterly disregarded it. He took itsomewhat thus: "Instead of lingering I'll enjoy myself and go out--alittle sooner. I'll _live_. The time is very short." His was not anature, anyhow, that could heed a warning. He could not kneel. Uprightand unflinching, he went to meet things as they came, reckless, unwise,but certainly not afraid. And this characteristic operated now. He ranto meet Death full tilt in the uncharted spaces that lay behind thestars. With love for a companion now, he raced, his speed increasingfrom day to day, she, as he thought, knowing merely that he sought her,but had not guessed his darker secret that was now his _lesser_ secret.
And in the desert, this afternoon of the picnic, the great thing hesped to meet had shown itself with its familiar touch of appallingcold and shadow, familiar, because all minds know of and accept it;appalling because, until realised close, and with the mental power atthe full, it remains but a name the heart refuses to believe in. And hehad discovered that its name was--Life.
Rivers had seen the Wave that sweeps incessant, tireless, but as arule invisible, round the great curve of the bulging earth, brushingthe nations into the deeps behind. It had followed him home to thestreets and houses of Helouan. He saw it _now_, as he leaned from hiswindow, dim and immense, too huge to break. Its beauty was nameless,undecipherable. His coughing echoed back from the wall of its greatsides.... And the music floated up at the same time from the ball-roomin the opposite wing. The two sounds mingled. Life, which is love, andDeath, which is their unchanging partner, held hands beneath the stars.
He leaned out farther to drink in the cool, sweet air. Soon, on thisair, his body would be dust, driven, perhaps, against her very cheek,trodden on possibly by her little foot--until, in turn, she joined himtoo, blown by the same wind loose about the desert. True. Yet at thesame time they would always be together, always somewhere side by side,continuing in the vast universe, _alive_. This new, absolute convictionwas in him now. He remembered the curious, sweet perfume in the desert,as of flowers, where yet no flowers are. It was the perfume of life.But in the desert there is no life. Living things that grow and moveand utter, are but a protest against death. In the desert they areunnecessary, because death there _is_ not. Its overwhelming vitalityneeds no insolent, visible proof, no protest, no challenge, no littlesigns of life. The message of the desert is immortality....
He went finally to bed, just before midnight. Hovering magnificentlyjust outside his window, Death watched him while he slept. The wavecrept to the level of his eyes. He called her name....
* * * * *
And downstairs, meanwhile, the girl, knowing nothing, wondered where hewas, wondered unhappily and restlessly; more--though this she did notunderstand--wondered motheringly. Until to-day, on the ride home, andfrom their singular conversation together, she had guessed nothing ofhis reason for being at Helouan, where so many come in order to findlife. She only knew her own. And she was but twenty-five....
Then, in the desert, when that touch of unearthly chill had stolen outof the sand towards sunset, she had realised clearly, astonished shehad not seen it long ago, that this man loved her, yet that somethingprevented his obeying the great impulse. In the life of Paul Rivers,whose presence had profoundly stirred her heart the first time she sawhim, there was some obstacle that held him back, a barrier his honourmust respect. He could never tell her of his love. It could lead tonothing. Knowing that he was not married, her intuition failed herutterly at first. Then, in their silence on the homeward ride, thetruth had somehow pressed up and touched her with its hand of ice. Inthat disjointed conversation at the end, which reads as it sounded, asthough no coherent meaning lay behind the words, and as though bothsought to conceal by speech what yet both burned to utter, she haddivined his darker secret, and knew that it was the same as her own.She understood then it was Death that had tracked them from the desert,following with its gigantic shadow from the sandy wastes. The cold,the darkness, the silence which cannot answer, the stupendous mysterywhich is the spell of its inscrutable Presence, had risen about themin the dusk, and kept them company at a little distance, until thelights of Helouan had bade it halt. Life which may not, cannot end, hadfrightened her.
His time, perhaps, was even shorter than her own. None knew his secret,since he was alone in Egypt and was caring for himself. Similarly,since she bravely kept her terror to herself, her mother had no inklingof her own, aware merely that the disease was in her system and thather orders were to be extremely cautious. This couple, therefore,shared secretly together the two clearest glimpses of eternity lifehas to offer to the soul. Side by side they looked into the splendideyes of Love and Death. Life, moreover, with its instinct for simpleand terrific drama, had produced this majestic climax, breaking withpathos, at the very moment when it could not be developed--this sideof the stars. They stood together upon the stage, a stage emptied ofother human players; the audience had gone home and the lights werebeing lowered; no music sounded; the critics were a-bed. In this greatgame of Consequences it was known where he met her, what he said andwhat she answered, possibly what they did and even what the worldthought. But "what the consequence was" would remain unknown, untold.That would happen in the big spaces of which the desert in its silence,its motionless serenity, its shelterless, intolerable vastness, is theperfect symbol. And the desert gives no answer. It sounds no challenge,for it is complete. Life in the desert makes no sign. It _is_.
4
In the hotel that night there arrived by chance a famous Internationaldancer, whose dahabiyeh lay anchored at San Giovanni, in the Nile belowHelouan; and this woman, with her party, ha
d come to dine and takepart in the festivities. The news spread. After twelve the lights werelowered, and while the moonlight flooded the terraces, streaming pastpillar and colonnade, she rendered in the shadowed halls the music ofthe Masters, interpreting with an instinctive genius messages which areeternal and divine.
Among the crowd of enthralled and delighted guests, the girl saton the steps and watched her. The rhythmical interpretation held apower that seemed, in a sense, inspired; there lay in it a certainunconscious something that was pure, unearthly; something that thestars, wheeling in stately movements over the sea and desert know;something the great winds bring to mountains where they play together;something the forests capture and fix magically into their gatheringof big and little branches. It was both passionate and spiritual, wildand tender, intensely human and seductively non-human. For it wasoriginal, taught of Nature, a revelation of naked, unhampered life. Itcomforted, as the desert comforts. It brought the desert awe into thestuffy corridors of the hotel, with the moonlight and the whisperingof stars, yet behind it ever the silence of those grey, mysterious,interminable spaces which utter to themselves the wordless song oflife. For it was the same dim thing, she felt, that had followed herfrom the desert several hours before, halting just outside the streetsand houses as though blocked from further advance; the thing thathad stopped her foolish painting, skilled though she was, because ithides behind colour and not in it; the thing that veiled the meaningin the cryptic sentences she and he had stammered out together; thething, in a word, as near as she could approach it by any means ofinterior expression, that the realisation of death for the first timemakes comprehensible--Immortality. It was unutterable, but it _was_.He and she were indissolubly together. Death was no separation. Therewas no death.... It was terrible. It was--she had already used theword--awful, full of awe.
"In the desert," thought whispered, as she watched spellbound, "itis impossible even to conceive of death. The idea is meaningless. Itsimply is not."
The music and the movement filled the air with life which, beingthere, must continue always, and continuing always can have never hada beginning. Death, therefore, was the great revealer of life. Withoutit none could realise that they are alive. Others had discovered thisbefore her, but she did not know it. In the desert no one can realisedeath: it is hope and life that are the only certainty. The entireconception of the Egyptian system was based on this--the conviction,sure and glorious, of life's endless continuation. Their tombs andtemples, their pyramids and sphinxes surviving after thousands ofyears, defy the passage of time and laugh at death; the very bodiesof their priests and kings, of their animals even, their fish, theirinsects, stand to-day as symbols of their stalwart knowledge.
And this girl, as she listened to the music and watched the inspireddancing, remembered it. The message poured into her from many sides,though the desert brought it clearest. With death peering into her facea few short weeks ahead, she thought instead of--life. The desert,as it were, became for her a little fragment of eternity, focusedinto an intelligible point for her mind to rest upon with comfortand comprehension. Her steady, thoughtful nature stirred towards anobjective far beyond the small enclosure of one narrow lifetime. Thescale of the desert stretched her to the grandeur of its own imperialmeaning, its divine repose, its unassailable and everlasting majesty.She looked beyond the wall.
Eternity! That which is endless; without pause, without beginning,without divisions or boundaries. The fluttering of her brave yetfrightened spirit ceased, aware with awe of its own everlastingness.The swiftest motion produces the effect of immobility; excessivelight is darkness; size, run loose into enormity, is the same as theminutely tiny. Similarly, in the desert, life, too overwhelming andterrific to know limit or confinement, lies undetailed and stupendous,still as deity, a revelation of nothingness because it is all. Turnedgolden beneath its spell that the music and the rhythm made even morecomprehensible, the soul in her, already lying beneath the shadow ofthe great wave, sank into rest and peace, too certain of itself tofear. And panic fled away. "I am immortal ... because I _am_. And whatI love is not apart from me. It is myself. We are together endlesslybecause we _are_."
Yet in reality, though the big desert brought this, it was Love,which, being of similar parentage, interpreted its vast meaning to herlittle heart--that sudden love which, without a word of preface orexplanation, had come to her a short three weeks before.... She wentup to her room soon after midnight, abruptly, unexpectedly stricken.Some one, it seemed, had called her name. She passed his door.
The lights had been turned up. The clamour of praise was loud round thefigure of the weary dancer as she left in a carriage for her dahabiyehon the Nile. A low wind whistled round the walls of the great hotel,blowing chill and bitter between the pillars of the colonnades. Thegirl heard the voices float up to her through the night, and once more,behind the confused sound of the many, she heard her own name called,but more faintly than before, and from very far away. It came throughthe spaces beyond her open window; it died away again; then--but forthe sighing of that bitter wind--silence, the deep silence of thedesert.
And these two, Paul Rivers and the girl, between them merely a floorof that stone that built the Pyramids, lay a few moments before theWave of Sleep engulfed them. And, while they slept, two shadowy formshovered above the roof of the quiet hotel, melting presently intoone, as dreams stole down from the desert and the stars. Immortalitywhispered to them. On either side rose Life and Death, towering insplendour. Love, joining their spreading wings, fused the giganticoutlines into one. The figures grew smaller, comprehensible. Theyentered the little windows. Above the beds they paused a moment,watching, waiting, and then, like a wave that is just about to break,they stooped....
And in the brilliant Egyptian sunlight of the morning, as she wentdownstairs, she passed his door again. She had awakened, but he slepton. He had preceded her. It was next day she learned his room wasvacant.... Within the month she joined him, and within the year thecool north wind that sweetens Lower Egypt from the sea blew the dustacross the desert as before. It is the dust of kings, of queens, ofpriests, princesses, lovers. It is the dust no earthly power canannihilate. It, too, lasts for ever. There was a little more of it ...the desert's message slightly added to: Immortality.
Day and Night Stories Page 5
