The studies that had fascinated his mind in earlier youth returned with the power that had subdued his mind in boyhood. Sand screened her visage with the veil of centuries. Stapled Paperback. Still hesitating, he was yet so eager to hear. For geometry lies at the root of all possible phenomena; and is the mind's interpretation of a living movement towards shape that shall express it." Sand, by Algernon Blackwood. "They probably were sand," his wife suggested, burning to tell another story of her own. But, as in nightmare, no sound escaped his lips. These two contrary emotions grafted themselves on all he did and saw. I wrote it down, as well as I could remember. by. But the shuttered windows revealed no stooping figure with eyes glued to a telescope. For as she talked the spirit of old Egypt moved up, staring down upon him out of eyes lidded so curiously level. All recent memories had been drowned in the tide that flooded him from an immeasurable Past. Against the darker background of Vance's fear and sinister purpose—both of this present life, and recent—he saw the grandeur of this woman's impossible dream, and knew, beyond argument or reason, that it was true. Through all things the impulse poured and spread, like fire at white heat. he repeated below his breath. Those eyes, he felt, had looked upon unusual things; "dreaminess" was not an adequate description; "searching" conveyed it better. Through the morning mists upon the Nile an old pyramid bowed hugely at him across London roofs: "Come," he heard its awful whisper beneath the ceiling, "I have things to show you, and to tell." The ghost of it still lingered in the air. Get started by clicking the "Add" button. It was so simple a manoeuvre by which Fate began the innocent game. The wind nipped keenly here again, coming over the leagues of cooling sand. It had made him start. There rose, from leagues away, the chanting of the sand. There is no cry in the world like that of the homeless wind. And their smiles, concealed yet just discernible, went broadening with the darkness into a Desert laughter. "What we know instinctively," she continued, "is simply what we are trying to remember. You know the kind of face and head these limestone strata in the Desert take—great visages with square Egyptian head-dresses where the driven sand has eaten away the softer stuff beneath? And he imagined them as one: multiple expressions of some single unearthly portent they adumbrated in mighty form—dead symbols of some spiritual conception long vanished from the world. The scenery changed about him as he listened. At night the jackals cried in the darkness round his cautiously-fed camp fire—small, because wood had to be carried—and in the day-time kites circled overhead to inspect him, and an occasional white vulture flapped across the blue. "Stay here with us," he heard a host of muffled voices crying, but their sound was smothered, buried, rising through the ground. And, as the way ever was with him, Henriot next fell to constructing the possible lives of herself and her companion, though without much success. The unwinking stare of eyes—lidless eyes that yet ever succeed in hiding—looked out under well-marked, level eyebrows, suggesting a vision that included the motives and purposes of his very heart. For the moonrise over the Mokattam Hills brought a white, grand loveliness that drenched the entire Desert. He felt the pull of a thousand miles before him; and twice a thousand years drove at his back. For this terrific release of force long held back, long stored up, latent for centuries, came pouring down the empty Wadi bed prepared for its reception. The Desert watched him, but it did not answer. And then he woke, with a curious shaking in his heart, and a little touch of chilly perspiration on the skin. But how can I help? And about the personalities of Lady Statham and her nephew they crowded like flies attracted by a dish of fruit. Sound died away. Through the large windows where once the Khedive held high court, the sunshine blazed upon vistaed leagues of Desert. Whence came this prodigious glad excitement in his heart, this sense of mighty Powers coaxed down to influence the very details of daily life? Other sounds came to his ears from far away, running past him through the air from every side, and from incredible distances, all flocking down into the Wadi bed to join the parent note that summoned them. Then, with an abrupt rise and fall like a wailing voice that sought to claim attention, it called him. "At least, you are free from that cheap scepticism which labels these old beliefs as superstition." What was it, then, that suddenly strengthened this solitary link so that the chain tautened and he felt the pull of it? It was Richard Vance who somehow streaked them through with black. But it was all many, oh so many leagues away; centuries lay between him and this modern world. Trying hard to disbelieve it, he found he could not. Anybody can induce subjective vision. "Felix, you'd better clear out. They were not merely imaginative speculations. "Tell it all," her husband said, quite gravely too. He could not stop this sliding current of the years. And Mansfield told it plainly enough, evidently glad to get it done, though. For stubborn matter turned docile before the stress of this returning life, taught somewhere to be plastic. What surprised him was that he felt no desire to laugh, and little even to doubt. For not alone these ribs of gleaming limestone contributed towards the elemental visages, but the entire hills, of which they were an outcrop, ran to assist in the formation, and were a necessary part of them. There were stretches of deep sea-green as well, far off upon its bosom. We’d love your help. There was only the shrill whistling cry of the lizards, and the sing-song of a white-robed Arab gliding down the sandy street. And Vance began without the smallest circumlocution. Tales by one the greatest practitioners of supernatural literature. ", "She said five words—and her voice—it'll make you laugh—it was metallic like a gong: 'You are in danger here.' We are a small DVD releasing company based in Toronto, Canada. From the pockets of a coat—he had worn it last summer down Dorset way—out trickled sand. Vance desired a witness of the extraordinary experiment, but he desired this witness, not merely for the purpose of sketching possible shapes that might present themselves to excited vision. 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. With these two counters Nightmare played. Here was the stillness of eternity. They talked for long after that—far into the night. For the face combined too ill-assorted qualities: an obstinate tenacity that might even mean brutality, and was certainly repulsive, yet, with it, an undecipherable dreaminess betrayed by lines of the mouth, but above all in the very light blue eyes, so rarely raised. Something enormous, with rustling skirts of sand, had just retreated far into the Desert. Some curtain, then, that for centuries had veiled the world, drew softly up, leaving a shaded vista down which the eyes of his soul peered towards long-forgotten pictures. And, again, hidden swiftly behind it like a movement running below water—"What does he want with it? It was so clear and sure—had been lying in the background all along. And through these sounds he heard his own voice answer: "I will come—yes. The instinct flashed and passed. I only remember that I got off my donkey and went up closer, and when I was within a dozen yards of him—well, it sounds such rot, you know, but I swear the things suddenly rushed off and left him there alone. It was like defying deity. He went himself on foot. The partial revelation he would witness—yet so vast, even this little bit of it, that it came as a Procession and a host. Behind the solid mass of the Desert's immobility flashed something swift and light and airy. Henriot walked on and on, aware of utter loneliness. There was an implacable sternness in the set of lips and jaw, and, most curious of all, the eyelids over the steady eyes of black were level as a ruler. And the moving stream he had been unaware of when crossing the bed itself, now began again. Why was it, he wondered afterwards, that for a moment something in him shrank, and that his mind, metaphorically speaking, flung up an arm in self-protection? Before he had gone the first two miles of his hour's journey, the twilight caught the rocky hills and twisted them into those monstrous revelations of physiognomies they barely take the trouble to conceal even in the daytime. About Algernon Blackwood. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Firmly determined to keep caution uppermost, yet he went unresistingly to a secluded corner by the palms where they could talk in privacy. And the magic of old Egypt stalked beside him. The emotion that produced Innisfree passed strongly through him. Material relics, equally misunderstood, still stood to-day at Karnac, Stonehenge, and in the mysterious writings on buried Mexican temples and cities, so significantly akin to the hieroglyphics upon the Egyptian tombs. He switched the lights on. A starting-point, you see, for more—leading, she hopes, to a complete reconstruction.". For a man who knew the full content of his thought at such a time would solve some of the oldest psychological problems in the world. Of course, the probabilities were that he was hopelessly astray—one usually is on such occasions—but this time, it so happened, he was singularly right. Although no echoes, properly speaking, were possible, these precipices caught stray notes that trooped in from the further sandy reaches. Other things could rouse this wildness too: falling water, the singing of a bird, an odour of wood-fire, a glimpse of winding road. And the answer, coming up automatically, startled him. When it retired he floundered without a rudder, in confusion. There was no hint of the melancholy that belongs commonly to flatness; the sadness of wide, monotonous landscape was not here. It was centuries old. The important part of the ancient ritual lay, he remembered, in the powers of the evoking mind. The soul awoke and whispered in him while his body slept. These people had been wiser to choose another place for the flaunting of their tawdry insignificance. Yet he remembered them; and, thus robbed of association that names bring, he saw them for an instant naked, and knew that one of them was evil. This wind brought life. Their minds certainly knew contact from that moment. He recognised them, cold in him of death, though the outlines reared higher than the pyramids, and towered up to hide whole groups of stars. The man, his name still out of reach, was sinister, impure and dark at the heart. Contents: Somewhere lay a little spot of streets and houses; its name escaped him. The motion altered somewhere. But it came with a sense of more than curiosity or wonder. Egypt itself was colonised by a group of Atlantean priests who brought their curious, deep knowledge with them. A sudden subsidence had freed his feet. ", "And—to obtain this form or outline?" Swift as thought, in silence, the Desert stood on end against his very face. Anything might be true. Four Weird Tales by BLACKWOOD, Algernon Four stories: The Insanity of Jones, The Man Who Found Out, The Glamour of the Snow, and Sand. Algernon Blumfield, E Knox St, Lubbock, Lubbock 8067436783 Texas: 806-743-5644: Destany Alasass, N C R 2900, Lubbock, Lubbock 8067435644 Texas: 806-743-3612: Artha Conzoneri , Co Rd 1410, Lubbock, Lubbock 8067433612 Texas: 806-743-5404: Pleas Bidinotto, W 11th St, Lubbock, Lubbock 8067435404 Texas: 806-743-1220 It looks like a jumble sale already!" Why had Vance put that idea into his mind, this idea of so peculiar danger? He faltered in his speech. The Desert lies all round it like a sea. 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 knowledge. Outside these trivial walls the Desert lay listening. There was a momentary break, a sense of abruptness and dislocation. His preoccupation with other thoughts deep down was so intense, that he was probably barely polite, uttering empty phrases, with his mind elsewhere. He stood a moment and watched the moon floating down behind the Sakkara Pyramids. Like this oasis, he basked in the sun of older time, and dreamed beneath forgotten moons. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's." Who were they? There was reverberation, rhythm, measure; there was almost the breaking of the stream into great syllables. "It was some years ago now, and I didn't know who he was then, or anything about him. They shook him where he stood, staring down into this river of strange invisible movement that was hundreds of feet in depth and a quarter of a mile across. "That's the best of having a cheap flat," he laughed, "and no ties in the world. "Evocation?" 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