There was a whistling among cordage, and the floor swayed

to and fro. He saw a sailor touch his cap and pocket the two-franc

piece. The syren hooted—ominous sound that had started him on many a

journey of adventure—and the roar of London became mere insignificant

clatter of a child’s toy carriages.

He loved that syren’s call; there was something deep and pitiless in

it. It drew the wanderers forth from cities everywhere: “Leave your

known world behind you, and come with me for better or for worse! The

anchor is up; it is too late to change. Only—beware! You shall know

curious things—and alone!”

Henriot stirred uneasily in his chair. He turned with sudden energy

to the shelf of guidebooks, maps and time-tables—possessions he most

valued in the whole room. He was a happy-go-lucky, adventure-loving

soul, careless of common standards, athirst ever for the new and

strange.

“That’s the best of having a cheap flat,” he laughed, “and no ties

in the world. I can turn the key and disappear. No one cares or

knows—no one but the thieving caretaker. And he’s long ago found out

that there’s nothing here worth taking!”

There followed then no lengthy indecision. Preparation was even

shorter still. He was always ready for a move, and his sojourn in

cities was but breathing-space while he gathered pennies for further

wanderings. An enormous kit-bag—sack-shaped, very worn and

dirty—emereged speedily from the bottom of a cupboard in the wall. It

was of limitless capacity. The key and padlock rattled in its depths.

Cigarette ashes covered everything while he stuffed it full of ancient,

indescribable garments. And his voice, singing of those “yellow bees in

the ivy bloom,” mingled with the crying of the rising wind about his

windows. His restlessness had disappeared by magic.

This time, however, there could be no haunted Pelion, nor shady

groves of Tempe, for he lived in sophisticated times when money markets

regulated movement sternly. Travelling was only for the rich; mere

wanderers must pig it. He remembered instead an opportune invitation to

the Desert. “Objective” invitation, his genial hosts had called it,

knowing his hatred of convention. And Helouan danced into letters of

brilliance upon the inner map of his mind. For Egypt had ever held his

spirit in thrall, though as yet he had tried in vain to touch the great

buried soul of her. The excavators, the Egyptologists, the

archaeologists most of all, plastered her grey ancient face with labels

like hotel advertisements on travellers’ portmanteaux. They told where

she had come from last, but nothing of what she dreamed and thought and

loved. The heart of Egypt lay beneath the sand, and the trifling

robbery of little details that poked forth from tombs and temples

brought no true revelation of her stupendous spiritual splendour.

Henriot, in his youth, had searched and dived among what material he

could find, believing once—or half believing—that the ceremonial of

that ancient system veiled a weight of symbol that was reflected from

genuine supersensual knowledgue. The rituals, now taken literally, and

so pityingly explained away, had once been genuine pathways of

approach. But never yet, and least of all in his previous visits to

Egypt itself, had he discovered one single person, worthy of speech,

who caught at his idea. “Curious,” they said, then turned away—to go

on digging in the sand. Sand smothered her world to-day. Excavators

discovered skeletons.