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"Three o'clock and a still starlight night in mid-September in Upper Egypt. At this hour the village is usually asleep, but to-night it is astir for this is Nauruz Allah, the New Year of God, and the narrow streets are full of the soft sound of bare feet moving towards the Nile. The village lies on a strip of ground; one one side is the river, now swollen to its height, on the other are the floods of the inundation spread in a vast sheet of water to the edge of the desert. On a windy night the lapping of wavelets is audible on every hand; but to-night the air is calm and still, there is no sound but the muffled tread of unshod feet in the dust and the murmur of voices subdued in the silence of the night.
In ancient times throughout the whole of Egypt the night of High Nile was a night of prayer and thanksgiving to the great god , the Ruler of the river, Osiris himself. Now it is only in this Coptic village that the ancient rite is preserved, and here the festival is still one of prayer and thanksgiving. In the great cities the New Year is a time of feasting and processions, as blatant and uninteresting as a Lord Mayor's Show, with that additional note of piercing vulgarity peculiar to the East.
In this village, far from all great cities, and-as a Coptic community-isolated from and therefore uninfluenced either by its Moslem neighbours or by foreigners, the festival is one of simplicity and piety. The people pray as of old to the Ruler of the river, no longer Osiris, but Christ; and as of old they pray for a blessing upon their children and their homes.
There are four appointed places on the river bank to which the village women go daily to fill their water-jars and to water their animals. To these four places the villagers are now making their way, there to keep the New Year of God.
The river gleams coldly pale and grey; Sirius blazing in the eastern sky casts a narrow path of light across the mile-wide waters. A faint glow low on the horizon shows where the moon will rise, a dying moon on the last day of the last quarter.
The glow gradually spreads and brightens till the thin crescent, like a fine silver wire, rises above the distant palms. Even in that attenuated form the moonlight eclipses the stars and the glory of Sirius is dimmed. The water turns to the colour of tarnished silver, smooth and glassy; the palm-trees close at hand stand black against the sky, and the distant shore is faintly visible. The river runs silently and without a ripple in the windless calm; the palm fronds, so sensitive to the least movement of the air, hang motionless and still; all Nature seems to rest upon this holy night.
The women enter the river and stand knee-deep in the running stream praying; they drink nine times, wash the face and hands, and dip themselves in the water. Here is a mother carrying a tiny wailing baby; she enters the river and gently pours the water nine times over the little head. The wailing ceases as the water cools the little hot face. Two anxious women hasten down the steep bank, a young boy between them; they hurriedly enter the water and the boy squats down in the river up to his neck, while the mother pours the water nine times with her hands over his face and shaven head. There is the sound of a little gasp at the first shock of coolness, and the mother laughs, a little tender laugh, and the grandmother says something under her breath, at which they all laugh softly together. After the ninth washing the boy stands up, then squats down again and is again washed nine times, and yet a third nine times; then the grandmother takes her turn and she also washes him nine times. Evidently he is very precious to the hearts of those two women, perhaps the mother's last surviving child. Another sturdy urchin refuses to sit down in the water, frightened perhaps, for a woman's voice speaks encouragingly, and presently a faint splashing and a little gurgle of childish laughter shows that he too is receiving the blessing of the Nauruz of God.
A woman stands alone, her slim young figure in its wet clinging garments silhouetted against the steel-grey water. Solitary she stands, apart from the happy groups of parents and children; then, stooping , she drinks from her once, pauses and drinks again; and so drinks nine times with a short pause between every drink and a longer pause between every three. Except for the movement of her hand as she lifts the water to her lips, she stands absolutely still, her body tense with the earnestness of her prayer, the very atmosphere round her charged with the agony of her supplication. Throughout the whole world there is only one thing which causes a woman to pray with such intensity, and that one thing is children. " This may be a childless woman praying for a child, or it may be that, in this land where Nature is as careless and wasteful of infant life as of all else, this a mother praying for the last of her little brood, feeling assured that on this festival of mothers and children her prayers must perforce be heard. At last she straightens herself, beats the water nine times with the corner of her garment, goes softly up the bank, and disappears in the darkness.
Little family parties come down to the river, a small child usually riding proudly on her father's shoulder. The men often affect to despise the festival as a woman's affair, but with memories in their hearts of their own mothers and their own childhood they sit quietly by the river and drink nine times. A few of the rougher young men fling themselves into the water and swim boisterously past, but public feeling is against them, for the atmosphere is one of peace and prayer enhanced by the calm and silence of the night.

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For thousands of years on the night of High Nile the mothers of Egypt have stood in the great river to implore from the God of the Nile a blessing upon their children; formerly from a God who Himself has memories of childhood and a Mother. Now, as then, the stream bears on its broad surface the echo of countless prayers, the hopes and fears of human hearts; and in my memory remains a vision of the darkly flowing river, the soft murmur of prayer, the peace and calm of

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In the end the numbers are all held by nine. It is as if in the beginning there is a great stillness. only the black hole of nine reverberates
Then the numbers slip out, first One and Eight, then Two and Seven, Three and Six, and finally Four and Five, in pairs, to take their place around the sigma circle.
The farthest away are given the most movement, to cut and dance across the inner space of the circle, as we saw in the shape of multiplications. The other numbers have less movement as they come nearer to Nine: One and Eight just move around the circum-ference of the circle. And the ninth spot remains unmoving.
In this secret world of arithmetic, nine controls the other numbers, releasing them into the world yet holding onto them tightly. And the sigma circle is its crucible into which all secret arithmetIc flows, im-printed by a hidden code.

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And the last movement of nine never seems to come, each revelation or discovery simply deepens the mystery. The fascination grows. Like a spiral the shape of nine continues to evade a simple end, winding itself further into enigma and exploration. Enjil said that the Mandala and his quest for nine was but a reflection on life: Who is the man or woman, he asked, who would not like to know the hidden path that holds on to all movement? Was he not right?
In the labyrinth of appearances with all its shout-ing, twists and turns, most of us become lost and bewildered. To find our way we need a code. On the surfaces of bent experience the straightness of our logic is not enough - there are no clues to a deeper understanding, no whispers that we must hear to make our inner world hold strong and have meaning.
At the heart of the story of Enjil and the Mandalas is the simple truth, that a secret in itself is beautiful and once that is known, then somehow the fact gains power and multiplies. The world that grows around it is never barren or wasted, for in every part we see the trace of the original idea. The many that is one has always been the greatest treasure to find.
In the eternal abstraction of points, number 9, will always find connections. To those who know how to look, the insights will grow.
There is no end, as long as there are the numbers.

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" THE STORY of the minor planets or asteroids, the small bodies that circle between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, began in 1772, J. D. Titius, a professor at Wittenberg, in Saxony, had observed a strange mathematical relationship between the dis- tances of five of the six planets then known. He simply took the numbers 3, 6, 12, etc" and added 4- to each. The resultant series can be matched against the relative planetary distances as follows:

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