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 are shifting, and it is you who are moving them away.'

His soul whispered it; his voice said quite another thing, although the words he used seemed oddly chosen:

'There is much in the ideas of ancient Egypt that has attracted me ever since I can remember, though I have never caught up with anything definite enough to follow. There was majesty somewhere in their conceptions⁠—a large, calm majesty of spiritual dominion, one might call it perhaps. I am interested.'

Her face remained expressionless as she listened, but there was grave conviction in the eyes that held him like a spell. He saw through them into dim, faint pictures whose background was always sand. He forgot that he was speaking with a woman, a woman who half an hour ago had been a stranger to him. He followed these faded mental pictures, though he never caught them up.⁠ ⁠… It was like his dream in London.

Lady Statham was talking⁠—he had not noticed the means by which she effected the abrupt transition⁠—of familiar beliefs of old Egypt; of the Ka, or Double, by whose existence the survival of the soul was possible, even its return into manifested, physical life; of the astrology, or influence of the heavenly bodies upon all sublunar activities; of terrific forms of other life, known to the ancient worship of Atlantis, great Potencies that might be invoked by ritual and ceremonial, and of their lesser influence as recognised in certain lower forms, hence treated with veneration as the 'Sacred Animal' branch of this dim religion. And she spoke lightly of the modern learning which so glibly imagined it was the