Days folded into each other, and something from the unearthly gleam of the desert edges entered his soul. His mind moved slowly. Sometimes he wondered if the old quick thinking and sharp mental activity would ever come back. At times he had no care regarding it, feeling that all surface glibness had passed for good. His orders so far were only arousing. He did not know as yet what he was to do in the Gobi, though the intimations were of a most challenging kind. He had been furnished with copies of manuscripts written in Chinese and in part in Sanscrit, containing information regarding the desert, information that the world at large would scoff at. He was advised concurrently to study these papers. More and more he realised that in ways other than his linguistic prowess he was fitted for the journey at hand. He thought much of Moira Kelvin and Nifton Bend. One night by the desert fire, with Bamban sitting expectantly near, the salient events of the year moved by in steady, and for the first time, ordered procession, beginning with his first glance at the yellow rug on the little river steamer _Sungkiang_—that whirlwind fortnight. For a month or so he had been close to death—he saw this clearly now—her laugh the note of his delirium, her kiss the heat of his fever. After that, a kind of low animal hate which had to burn out before decency and sense came. He was cool now. The night was winter clear. He would never have been able to see her so largely and definedly as now, had she taken him. She had become a kind of institution, but impersonal. His present run of thoughts was not without a touch of chivalry. He saw that there are very few really exciting vampires among the love-women; that no man strikes fire with a superb woman’s genius without enduring benefits. If a man figures out the cost in dollars for such an adventure he’s not a lover of quality. If a man’s career in the world is slowed somewhat, it’s an easy price to pay for being privileged to enter even for a little time the domain of a passionate woman’s genius. The yellow-rug woman was his initiation. The fact that he had glimpsed a devil in her too much for a boy to subdue, no longer prevented him from seeing that the fault was his own weakness and that her devil was in no way smug. He had well put away the cheap male diversion of hating all women, because he had met one too great to hide herself in him. He did not want Moira Kelvin back, but his heart was strangely expectant of meeting some one of her quality, some glory akin to hers, but nearer his own full comprehension. Because he did encounter something of this kind, he is present on these pages. The rest—the strangeness, the peril, the desert itself, is mere setting and arrangement.