SON OF THE WIND
ing on flinty substance. He half unclosed his eyes and saw a white level stretching from where he lay. A swarm of confused memories rose in his mind. He thought he was lying on the rock above the quicksand. He moved his head, and opened his eyes wider, expecting to see the Sphinx's face. He saw at short distance a tumult of dust from the heart of which came sounds like blows. Then a head like a black snake's rose out of the cloud. He saw the ears laid flat, the nostrils expanded thin, the line of the frontal bone showing keen. It had been less pitiful without that look of fury, less terrible without the look of despair. Then a sound shrill and appalling, a voice without articulate words crying on the heavens to witness man. Then the head disappeared. Still the cloud of dust, and, out of it, four feet kicking frantically, struggling with an enemy, invisible, more overpowering than man. Then only a cloud of dust.
Lifted up on his hands, Carron watched this turn and drift like a curtain. There was not the smallest movement behind it now—not a sound. He wondered at the stillness. For so long his ears had been. full of the clamor of sounds, his eyes reporting pictures of rapid motion. His brain, his intuition laboring against odds of cunning and strength. Now
406
