It calmed and
soothed him in one sense, yet in another, a sense he could not
understand, it caught him in a net of deep, deep feelings whose mesh,
while infinitely delicate, was utterly stupendous. His nerves this
deeper emotion left alone; it reached instead to something infinite in
him that mere nerves could neither deal with nor interpret. The soul
awoke and whispered in him while his body slept.
And the little, foolish dreams that ran to and fro across this veil
of surface sleep brought oddly tangled pictures of things quite tiny
and at the same time of others that were mighty beyond words. With
these two counters Nightmare played. They interwove. There was the
figure of this dark-faced man with the compass, measuring the sky to
find the true north, and there were hints of giant Presences that
hovered just outside some curious outline that he traced upon the
ground, copied in some nightmare fashion from the heavens. The
excitement caused by his visitor’s singular request mingled with the
profounder sensations his final look at the stars and Desert stirred.
The two were somehow inter-related.
Some hours later, before this surface sleep passed into genuine
slumber, Henriot woke—with an appalling feeling that the Desert had
come creeping into his room and now stared down upon him where he lay
in bed. The wind was crying audibly about the walls outside. A faint,
sharp tapping came against the window panes.
He sprang instantly out of bed, not yet awake enough to feel actual
alarm, yet with the nightmare touch still close enough to cause a sort
of feverish, loose bewilderment. He switched the lights on. A moment
later he knew the meaning of that curious tapping, for the rising wind
was flinging tiny specks of sand against the glass. The idea that they
had summoned him belonged, of course, to dream.
He opened the window, and stepped out on to the balcony. The stone
was very cold under his bare feet. There was a wash of wind all over
him. He saw the sheet of glimmering, pale desert near and far; and
something stung his skin below the eyes.
“The sand,” he whispered, “again the sand; always the sand. Waking
or sleeping, the sand is everywhere—nothing but sand, sand. Sand…
.”
He rubbed his eyes. It was like talking in his sleep, talking to
Someone who had questioned him just before he woke. But was he really
properly awake? It seemed next day that he had dreamed it. Something
enormous, with rustling skirts of sand, had just retreated far into the
Desert. Sand went with it—flowing, trailing, smothering the world. The
wind died down.
And Henriot went back to sleep, caught instantly away into
unconsciousness covered, blinded, swept over by this spreading thing of
reddish brown with the great, grey face, whose Being was colossal yet
quite tiny, and whose fingers, wings and eyes were countless as the
stars.
But all night long it watched and waited, rising to peer above the
little balcony, and sometimes entering the room and piling up beside
his very pillow. He dreamed of Sand.
FOR SOME DAYS Henriot saw little of the man who came from Birmingham
and pushed curiosity to a climax by asking for a compass in the middle
of the night. For one thing, he was a good deal with his friends upon
the other side of Helouan, and for another, he slept several nights in
the Desert.
He loved the gigantic peace the Desert gave him. The world was
forgotten there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it.
Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.
An Arab boy and donkey took out sleeping-bag, food and water to the
Wadi Hof, a desolate gorge about an hour eastwards. It winds between
cliffs whose summits rise some thousand feet above the sea. It opens
suddenly, cut deep into the swaying world of level plateaux and
undulating hills. It moves about too; he never found it in the same
place twice—like an arm of the Desert that shifted with the changing
lights. Here he watched dawns and sunsets, slept through the mid-day
heat, and enjoyed the unearthly colouring that swept Day and Night
across the huge horizons.
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