He had it at last. He even stole out on to his balcony to see if the
stranger perhaps was looking through some wonderful apparatus at the
heavens. Their rooms were on the same side. But the shuttered windows
revealed no stooping figure with eyes glued to a telescope. The stars
blinked in their many thousands down upon the silent desert. The night
held neither sound nor movement. There was a cool breeze blowing across
the Nile from the Lybian Sands. It nipped; and he stepped back quickly
into the room again. Drawing the mosquito curtains carefully about the
bed, he put the light out and turned over to sleep.

And sleep came quickly, contrary to his expectations, though it was a
light and surface sleep. That last glimpse of the darkened Desert lying
beneath the Egyptian stars had touched him with some hand of awful power
that ousted the first, lesser excitement. 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