I shall never forget the desolation of that strange scene beneath the morning stars. The desert lay down and watched us. We stood upon the brink of a little broken ridge, looking into the valley of golden sand. This sand gleamed soft and wonderful in the starlight some twenty feet below. The descent was easy--but I would not move. I refused to advance another step. I saw my companions in the mysterious half-light beside me peering over the edge, Moleson in front a little. And I turned to him, sure of the part I meant to play, yet conscious painfully of my helplessness. My personality seemed a straw in mid-stream that spun in a futile effort to arrest the flood that bore it. There was vivid human conflict in the moment’s silence. It was an eddy that paused in the great body of the tide. And then I spoke. Oh, I was ashamed of the insignificance of my voice and the weakness of my little personality. ‘Moleson, we go no farther with you. We have already come too far. We now turn back.’ Behind my words were a paltry thirty years. His answer drove sixty centuries against me. For his voice was like the wind that passed whispering down the stream of yellow sand below us. He smiled. ‘Our feet are set towards Enet-te-ntōrē. There is no turning back. Listen! It is calling, calling, calling!’ ‘We will go home,’ I cried, in a tone I vainly strove to make imperative. ‘Our home is there,’ he sang, pointing with one long thin arm towards the brightening east, ‘for the Temple calls us and the River takes our feet. We shall be in the House of Birth to meet the sunrise----’ ‘You lie,’ I cried again, ‘you speak the lies of madness, and this Past you seek is the House of Death. It is the kingdom of the underworld.’ The words tore wildly, impotently out of me. I seized George Isley’s arm. ‘Come back with me,’ I pleaded vehemently, my heart aching with a nameless pain for him. ‘We’ll retrace our steps. Come home with me! Come back! Listen! The Present calls you sweetly!’ His arm slipped horribly out of my grasp that had seemed to hold it so tightly. Moleson, already below us in the yellow sand, looked small with distance. He was gliding rapidly farther with uncanny swiftness. The diminution of his form was ghastly. It was like a doll’s. And his voice rose up, faint as with the distance of great gulfs of space. ‘Calling ... calling.... You hear it for ever calling ...’ It died away with the wind along that sandy valley, and the Past swept in a flood across the brightening sky. I swayed as though a storm was at my back. I reeled. Almost I went too--over the crumbling edge into the sand. ‘Come back with me! Come home!’ I cried more faintly. ‘The Present alone is real. There is work, ambition, duty. There is beauty too--the beauty of good living! And there is love! There is--a woman ... calling, calling...!’ That other voice took up the word below me. I heard the faint refrain sing down the sandy walls. The wild, sweet pang in it was marvellous.