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 rather, he declined to ask them. He recalled, somehow uneasily, that in ceremonial the points of the compass have significance, standing for forces and activities that sleep there until invoked, and a passing light fell upon that curious midnight request in the corridor upstairs. These two were on the track of undesirable experiments, he thought.⁠ ⁠… They wished to include him too.

'You go at night sometimes into the Desert?' he heard himself saying. It was impulsive and miscalculated. His feeling that it would be wise to change the conversation resulted in giving it fresh impetus instead.

'We saw you there⁠—in the Wadi Hof,' put in Vance, suddenly breaking his long silence; 'you too sleep out, then? It means, you know, the Valley of Fear.'

'We wondered⁠—' It was Lady Statham's voice, and she leaned forward eagerly as she said it, then abruptly left the sentence incomplete. Henriot started; a sense of momentary acute discomfort again ran over him. The same second she continued, though obviously changing the phrase⁠—'we wondered how you spent your day there, during the heat. But you paint, don't you? You draw, I mean?'

The commonplace question, he realised in every fibre of his being, meant something they deemed significant. Was it his talent for drawing that they sought to use him for? Even as he answered with a simple affirmative, he had a flash of intuition that might be fanciful, yet that might be true: that this extraordinary pair were intent upon some ceremony of evocation that should summon into actual physical expression some Power⁠—some type of life⁠—known long ago to ancient worship, and that they even