Till, at last, with a

violent effort he turned and seized it. And then the thing he grasped

at slipped between his fingers and ran easily away. It had a grey and

yellow face, and it moved through all its parts. It flowed as water

flows, and yet was solid. It was centuries old.

He cried out to it. “Who are you? What is your name? I surely know

you … but I have forgotten … ?”

And it stopped, turning from far away its great uncovered

countenance of nameless colouring. He caught a voice. It rolled and

boomed and whispered like the wind. And then he woke, with a curious

shaking in his heart, and a little touch of chilly perspiration on the

skin.

But the voice seemed in the room still—close beside him:

“I am the Sand,” he heard, before it died away.

And next he realised that the glitter of Paris lay behind him, and a

steamer was taking him with much unnecessary motion across a sparkling

sea towards Alexandria. Gladly he saw the Riviera fade below the

horizon, with its hard bright sunshine treacherous winds, and its smear

of rich, conventional English. All restlessness now had left him. True

vagabond still at forty, he only felt the unrest and discomfort of life

when caught in the network of routine and rigid streets, no chance of

breaking loose. He was off again at last, money scarce enough indeed,

but the joy of wandering expressing itself in happy emotions of

release. Every warning of calculation was stifled. He thought of the

American woman who walked out of her Long Island house one summer’s day

to look at a passing sail—and was gone eight years before she walked

in again. Eight years of roving travel! He had always felt respect and

admiration for that woman.

For Felix Henriot, with his admixture of foreign blood, was

philosopher as well as vagabond, a strong poetic and religious strain

sometimes breaking out through fissures in his complex nature. He had

seen much life; had read many books. The passionate desire of youth to

solve the world’s big riddles had given place to a resignation filled

to the brim with wonder. Anything might be true. Nothing surprised him.

The most outlandish beliefs, for all he knew, might fringe truth

somewhere. He had escaped that cheap cynicism with which disappointed

men soothe their vanity when they realise that an intelligible

explanation of the universe lies beyond their powers. He no longer

expected final answers.

For him, even the smallest journeys held the spice of some

adventure; all minutes were loaded with enticing potentialities. And

they shaped for themselves somehow a dramatic form. “It’s like a

story,” his friends said when he told his travels. It always was a

story.

But the adventure that lay waiting for him where te silent streets

of little Helouan kiss the great Desert’s lips, was of a different kind

to any Henriot had yet encountered. Looking back, he has often asked

himself, “How in the world can I accept it?”

And, perhaps, he never yet has accepted it. It was sand that brought

it. For the Desert, the stupendous thing that mothers little Helouan,

produced it.

[1] “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” —W. B. Yeats.

[2] Prometheus Unbound —Percy Bysshe Shelley.

II

HE SLIPPED through Cairo with the same relief that he left the

Riviera, resenting its social vulgarity so close to the imperial

aristocracy of the Desert; he settled down into the peace of soft and

silent little Helouan.