 Preface. This book is only an uncomfortably large notebook, and it has the disadvantages, whether or no it has the advantages, of notes that are taken on the spot. Owing to the unexpected distraction of other duties, the notes were published in a newspaper as they were made on the spot, and are now reproduced in a book as they were published in the newspaper. The only exception refers to the last chapter on Zionism, and even there the book only reverts to the original notebook. A difference of opinion, which divided the writer of the book from the politics of the newspaper, prevented the complete publication of that chapter in that place. I recognize that any expurgitated form of it would have falsified the proportions of my attempt to do justice in a very difficult problem. But on rereading, even my own attempt in extensio, I am far from satisfied that the proper proportions are kept. I wrote these first impressions in Palestine, where everybody recognizes the Jew as something quite distinct from the Englishman or the European, and where his unpopularity even moved me in the direction of his defense. But I admit it was something of a shock to return to a conventional atmosphere in which that unpopularity is still actually denied or described as mere persecution. It was more of a shock to realize that this most obscurantist of all types of obscurantism is still sometimes regarded as a sort of liberalism. To talk of the Jew always as the oppressed and never as the oppressors is simply absurd. It is as if men pleaded for reasonable help for exiled French aristocrats or ruined Irish landlords, and forgot that the French and Irish peasants had any wrongs at all. Moreover, the Jews in the West do not seem so much concerned to ask, as I have done however tentatively here, whether a larger and less local colonial development might really transfer the bulk of Israel to a more independent basis, as simply to demand the Jews shall continue to control other nations as well as their own. It might be worthwhile for England to take risks to settle the Jewish problem, but not to take risks merely to unsettle the Arab problem, and leave the Jewish problem unsolved. For the rest there must under the circumstances be only too many mistakes. The historical conjectures, for they can be no more, are founded on authorities sufficiently recognized for me to be permitted to trust them, but I had never pretended to the knowledge necessary to check them. I am aware that there are many disputed points, as for instance the connection of Girard, the fiery Templar, with the English town of Bidford. I am also aware that some are sensitive about the spelling of words, and the very proof-readers will sometimes revolt and turn Mohammed into Mohammed. On this point, however, I am unrepentant, for I never could see the point of altering a form with historic and even heroic fame in our own language, for the sake of reproducing by an arrangement of our letters, something that is really written in quite different letters and probably pronounced with quite different accent. In speaking of the great prophet, I am therefore resolved to call him Mohammed, and am prepared on further provocation to call him Mahoud. The Way of the Cities It was in the season of Christmas that I came out of my little garden in that field of the beaches between the Chilterns and the Thames, and began to walk backwards through history to the place from which Christmas came. For it is often necessary to walk backwards, as a man on the wrong road goes back to a signpost to find the right road. The modern man is more like a traveller who has forgotten the name of his destination, and has to go back whence he came even to find out where he is going. That the world has lost its way, few will not deny, and it did seem to me that I found at last a sort of signpost of a singular and significant shape, and saw for a moment in my mind the true map of the modern wanderings. But whether I shall be able to say anything of what I saw, this story must show. I had said farewell to all my friends, or all those with my own limited number of legs, and nothing living remained but a dog and a donkey. The reader will learn with surprise that my first feeling of fellowship went out to the dog. I am well aware that I lay open my guard to a lunge of wit. The dog is rather like a doggy, or a small caricature of one, with a large black head and long black ears. But in the mood of the moment there was rather a moral contrast than a pictorial parallel. For the dog did indeed seem to stand for home and everything I was leaving behind me, with reluctance, especially that season of the year. For one thing he is named after Mr. Winkle, the Christmas guest of Mr. Wardle, and there is indeed something Dickensian in his union of domesticity with exuberance. He jumped about me, barking like a small battery under the impression that I was going for a walk. But I could not alas take him with me on a stroll to Palestine. Incidentally, he would have been out of place, for dogs have not their due honor in the East, and this seemed to sharpen my sense of my own domestic sentinel as a sort of symbol of the West. On the other hand the East is full of donkeys, often very dignified donkeys, and when I turned my attention to the other grotesque quadruped with an even larger head and even longer ears, he seemed to take on a deep shade of Oriental mystery. I know not why these two absurd creatures tangled themselves up so much in my train of thought, like dragons and in illuminated text, or ramped like gargoyles on either side of the gateway of my adventure. But in truth they were in some sense symbols of the West and East, after all. The dog's very lawlessness is but an extravagance of loyalty. He will go mad with joy three times on the same day at going out for a walk down the same road. The modern world is full of fantastic forms of animal worship, a religion generally accompanied with human sacrifice. Yet we hear strangely little of the real merits of animals, and one of them surely is this innocence of all boredom. Perhaps such simplicity is the absence of sin. I have some sense myself of the sacred duty of surprise and the need of seeing the old road as a new road. But I cannot claim that whenever I go out for a walk with my family and friends, I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness, or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces. It is in this power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilization, and the donkey is really as different as is the Eastern civilization. His very anarchy is a sort of secrecy. His very revolt is a secret. He does not leap up because he wishes to share my walk, but to follow his own way, as lonely as the wild ass of scripture. My own beast of burden supports the authority of scripture by being a very wild ass. I have given him the name of Trotsky because he seldom trots, but either scampers or stands still. He scampers all over the field when it is necessary to catch him, and stands still when it is really urgent to drive him. He also breaks fences, eats vegetables, and fulfills other functions. In delays and destructions he could ruin a really poor man in a day. I wish this fact were more often remembered in judging whether really poor men have really been cruel to doggies. But I assure the reader that I am not cruel to my doggie. The cruelty is all the other way. He kicks the people who try to catch him, and again I am haunted by a dim human parallel, for it seems to me that many of us, in just detestation of the dirty trick of cruelty to animals, have really a great deal of patience with animals, more patience I fear than many of us have with human beings. Suppose I had to go out and catch my secretary in a field every morning, and suppose my secretary always kicked me by way of beginning the day's work. I wonder whether that day's work would resume its normal course as if nothing had happened. Nothing graver than these grotesque images and groping speculations would come into my conscious mind just then, though at the back of it there was an indescribable sense of regret and parting. All through my wanderings the dog remained in my memory as a decensian and domestic emblem of England, and if it is difficult to take a donkey seriously, it ought to be easiest at least for a man who is going to Jerusalem. There was a cloud of Christmas weather on the great grey beech woods and the silver cross of the crossroads, for the four roads that met in the marketplace of my little town make one of the largest and simplest of such outlines on the map of England, and the shape as it shines on that wooded chart always affects me in a singular fashion. The sight of the crossroads is, in a true sense, the sign of the cross, for it is the sign of a truly Christian thing, that sharp combination of liberty and limitation which we call choice. A man is entirely free to choose between right and left, between right and wrong. As I looked for the last time at the pale roads under the load of cloud, I knew that our civilization had indeed come to the crossroads. As the paths grew fainter, fading under the gathering shadow, I felt rather as if it had lost its way in a forest. It was at the time when people were talking about some menace of the end of the world. Not apocalyptic, but astronomical, and the cloud that covered the little town of Beaconsfield might have fitted in with such a fancy. It faded, however, as I left the place for the behind, and in London the weather, though wet, was comparatively clear. It was almost as if Beaconsfield had a domestic day of judgment, and an end of the world, all to itself. In a sense, Beaconsfield has four ends of the world. Its four corners are named ends, after the four nearest towns. But I was concerned only with the one called London End, and the very name of it was like a vision of some vain thing at once ultimate and infinite. The very title of London End sounds like the other end of nowhere, or what is worse of everywhere. It suggests a sort of derisive riddle. Where does London End? As I came up through the vast vague suburbs, it was this sense of London as a shapeless and endless muddle that chiefly filled my mind. I seemed still to carry the cloud with me, and when I looked up, I almost expected to see the chimney-pots as tangled as the trees, and in truth if there was now no material fog, there was any amount of mental and moral fog. The whole industrial world, symbolized by London, had reached a curious complication and confusion, not easy to parallel in human history. It is not a question of controversies, but rather of cross-purposes. As I went by chairing cross, my eye caught a poster about Labour politics with something about the threat of direct action, and a demand for nationalization. And quite apart from the merits of the case, it struck me that after all the direct action is very indirect, and the thing demanded is many steps away from the thing desired. It is all part of a sort of tangle in which terms and things cut across each other. The employers talk about private enterprise as if there were anything private about modern enterprise. Its combines are as big as many common welts, and things advertised in large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy. Meanwhile, the Labour men talk about the need to nationalize the minds or the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in plutocracy to nationalize the government, or even to nationalize the nation. The capitalists praise competition, while they create monopoly. The socialists urge a strike to turn workmen into soldiers and state officials, which is logically a strike against strikes. I merely mention it as an example of the bewildering inconsistency and for no controversial purpose. My own sympathies are with the socialists in so far as that there is something to be said for socialism and nothing to be said for capitalism. But the point is that when there is something to be said for one thing, it is now commonly said in support of the opposite thing. Never since the mob called out less bred more taxes in the nonsense story has there been so truly nonsensical a situation as that in which the strikers demand government control and the government denounces its own control as anarchy. The mob howls before the palace gates, hateful tyrant, we demand that you assume more despotic powers, and the tyrant thunders from the balcony, vile rebels, do you dare to suggest that my powers should be extended? There seems to be a little misunderstanding somewhere. In truth everything I saw told me that there was a large misunderstanding everywhere, a misunderstanding amounting to a mess, and as this was the last impression that London left on me, so it was the impression I carried with me about the whole modern problem of Western civilization, as a riddle to be read or a knot to be untied. To untie it it is necessary to get hold of the right end of it, and especially the other end of it. We must begin at the beginning, we must return to our first origins in history, as we must return to our first principles in philosophy. We must consider how we came to be doing what we do, and even saying what we say. As it is the very terms we use are either meaningless or something more than meaningless, inconsistent, even with themselves. This applies, for instance, to the talk of both sides in that labour controversy which I merely took in passing because it was the current controversy in London when I left. The capitalists say Bolshevism as one might say Bujum. It is merely a mystical and imaginative word suggesting horror, but it might mean many things, including some just and rational things. On the other hand, there could never be any meaning at all in the phrase the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is like saying the omnipresence of the omnibus conductors. It is fairly obvious that if an omnibus conductor were omnipotent, he would probably prefer to conduct something else besides an omnibus. Whatever its exponents mean, it is clearly something different from what they say. And even this verbal inconsistency, this mere welter of words, is a sign of the common confusion of thought. It is this sort of thing that made London seem like a limbo of lost words and possibly of lost wits. And it is here we find the value of what I have called walking backwards through history. It is one of the rare merits of modern mechanical travel that it enables us to compare widely different cities in rapid succession. The stages of my own progress were the chief cities of separate countries, and though more is lost in missing the countries something is gained in so sharply contrasting the capitals. And again it was one of the advantages of my own progress that it was a progress backwards, that it happened, as I have said, to retrace the course of history to older and older things, to Paris and to Rome and to Egypt and almost as it were to Eden. And finally it is one of the advantages of such a return that it did really begin to clarify the confusion of names and notions in modern society. I first became conscious of this when I went out of the Gardilion and walked along a row of cafes until I saw again a distant column crown with a dancing figure, the freedom that danced over the fall of the best deal. Here at least, I thought, is an origin and a standard, such as I missed in the mere muddle of industrial opportunism. The modern industrial world is not in the least democratic, but it is supposed to be democratic, or supposed to be trying to be democratic. The ninth century, the time of the Norse invasions, was not saintly in the sense of being filled with saints. It was filled with pirates, and petty tyrants, and the first feudal anarchy. But sanctity was the only ideal those barbarians had when they had any at all, and democracy is the only ideal the industrial millions have when they have any at all. Democracy was the light of the dark ages, or if you will the dream of the dark ages, and democracy is the dream of the dark ages of industrialism, if it be very much of a dream. It is this which prophets promise to achieve, and politicians pretend to achieve, and poets sometimes desire to achieve, and sometimes only desire to desire. In a word an equal citizenship is quite the reverse of the reality in the modern world. But it is still the ideal in the modern world. At any rate it has no other ideal. If the figure that has alighted on the column at the best deal be indeed the Spirit of Liberty, it must see a million growths in a modern city to make it wish to fly back again to heaven. But our circular society would not know what got us to put on the pillar in its place. As I looked at that sculpted goddess on that classical column my mind went back to another historic stage, and I asked myself where this classic and republican ideal came from, and the answer was equally clear. The place from which it had come was the place to which I was going, Rome, and it was not until I had reached Rome that I adequately realized the next great reality that simplified the whole story, and even this particular part of the story. I know nothing more abruptly arresting than that sudden steepness as of streets scaling the sky, where stands now cased in tile and brick and stone that small rock that rose and overshadowed the whole earth, the capital. Here in the gray dawn of our history sat the strong republic that set her foot upon the necks of kings, and it was from here assuredly that the Spirit of the Republic flew like an eagle to alight on that far-off pillar in the country of the Gauls. For it ought to be remembered, and it is too often forgotten, that if Paris inherited what may be called the authority of Rome, it is equally true that Rome anticipated all that is sometimes called the Anarchy of Paris. The expansion of the Roman Empire was accompanied by a sort of permanent Roman revolution, fully as furious as the French Revolution. So long as the Roman system was really strong, it was full of riots and mobs and democratic divisions, and any number of vestils fell as the temple of the victories rose. But though I had but a hurry glance at such things, there were among them some that further aided the solution of the problem. I saw the larger achievements of the later Romans, and the lesson that was still lacking was plainly there. I saw the Colosseum, a monument of that love of looking on at athletic sports, which is noted as a sign of decadence in the Roman Empire and of energy in the British Empire. I saw the baths of Caracalla, witnessing to a cult of cleanliness adduced also to prove the luxury of ancient Romans and the simplicity of Anglo-Saxons. All it really proves, either way, is the love of washing on a large scale, which might merely indicate that Caracalla, like other emperors, was a lunatic. But indeed what such things do indicate, if only indirectly, is something which is here much more important. They indicate not only a sincerity in the public spirit, but a certain smoothness in the public services. In a word, while there were many revolutions, there were no strikes. The citizens were often rebels, but there were men who were not rebels, because they were not citizens. The ancient world forced a number of people to do the work of the world first, before it allowed more privileged people to fight about the government of the world. The truth is trite enough, of course, it is in the single word, slavery, which is not the name of a crime like simony, but rather of a scheme like socialism, sometimes very like socialism. Only standing idly on one of those grassy mounds under one of those broken arches, I suddenly saw the labor problem of London, as I could not see it in London. I do not mean that I saw which side was right or what solution was reliable or any partisan points or repartees or any practical details about practical difficulties. I mean that I saw what it was, the thing itself, and the whole thing. The labor problem of today stood up quite simply, like a peak at which a man looks back and sees single and solid, though when he was walking over it was a wilderness of rocks. The labor problem is the attempt to have the democracy of Paris without the slavery of Rome. Between the Roman Republic and the French Republic something had happened. Whatever else it was, it was the abandonment of the ancient and fundamental human habit of slavery, the numbering of men for necessary labor as the normal foundation of society, even a society in which citizens were free and equal. When an idea of equal citizenship returned to the world, it found that world changed by a much more mysterious version of equality. So that London, handing on the lamp from Paris as well as Rome, is faced with a new problem touching the old practice of getting the work of the world done somehow. We have now to assume not only that all citizens are equal, but that all men are citizens. Capitalism attempted it by combining political equality with economic inequality. It assumed the rich could always hire the poor. But capitalism seems to me to have collapsed, to be not only a discredited ethic but a bankrupt business. Whether we shall return to pagan slavery or to small property, or by guilds or otherwise get to work in a new way, is not the question here. The question here was the one I asked myself standing on that green mound beside the Yellow River, and the answer to it lay ahead of me, along the road that ran towards the rising sun. What made the difference? What was it that had happened between the rise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the French Republic? Why did the equal citizen of the first take it for granted that there would be slaves? Why did the equal citizens of the second take it for granted there would not be slaves? How had this immemorial institution disappeared in the interval, so that nobody even dreamed of it or suggested it? How was it that when equality returned it was no longer the equality of citizens and had to be the equality of men? The answer is that this equality of men is in more senses than one a mystery. It is a mystery which I pondered as I stood in the corridor of the train going south from Rome. It was at daybreak, and as it happened, before anyone else had risen, that I looked out of the long row of windows, across a great landscape, gray with olives and still dark against the dawn. The dawn itself looked rather like a row of wonderful windows, a line of low casements unchuttered and shining under the eaves of cloud. There was a curious clarity about the sunrise, as if its sun might be made of glass rather than gold. It was the first time I had seen so closely, and covering such a landscape, the gray convolutions and hoary foliage of the olive, and all those twisted trees went by like a dance of dragons in a dream. The rocking railway train and the vanishing railway line seemed to be going to east as if disappearing into the sun, and save for the noise of the train there was no sound at all in that gray and silver solitude, not even the sound of a bird. Most of the plantations were mostly marked out in private plots and bore every trace of the care of private owners. It is seldom, I confess, that I so catch the world asleep, nor do I know why my answer should have come to me thus when I was myself only half awake. It is common, in such a case, to see some new signal or landmark, but in my experience it is rather the things already grown familiar, that suddenly grow strange and significant. Millions of olives must have flashed by before I saw the first olive, the first, so to speak, which really waved the olive branch, for I remembered at last to what land I was going, and I knew the name of the magic which had made all those peasants out of pagan slaves, and it has presented to the modern world a new problem of labor and liberty. It was as if I already saw, against the clouds of daybreak, that mountain which takes its title from the olive, and standing half visible upon it, a figure at which I did not look, ex-Oriente luxe, and I knew what dawn had broken over the ruins of Rome. I have taken but this one text or label out of a hundred such, the matter of labor and liberty, and I thought it worthwhile to trace it from one blatant and bewildering yellow poster in the London streets to its high places in history. But it is only one example of the way in which a thousand things grouped themselves and fell into perspective as I passed farther and farther from them, and drew near the central origins of civilization. I do not say that I saw the solution, but I saw the problem. In the litter of journalism and the chatter of politics it is too much of a puzzle even to be a problem. For instance a friend of mine described his book, The Path to Rome, as the journey through all Europe that the faith had saved, and I might very well describe my own journey as one through all Europe that the war had saved. The trail of the actual fighting, of course, was awfully apparent everywhere. The plantations of pale crosses seemed to crop up on every side like growing things, and the first French villages through which I passed had heard in the distant day and night the guns of the long battle line, like the breaking of an endless exterior sea of night upon the very borderland of the world. I felt it most as we passed the noble towers of Amiens, so near the high watermark of the high tide of barbarism, in that night of terror just before the turning of the tide. For the truth which thus grew clearer with travel is rightly represented by the metaphor of the artillery as the thunder and surf of a sea beyond the world. Whatever else the war was, it was like the resistance of something as solid as land and sometimes as patient and inert as land, against something as unstable as water and as weak as water, but also as strong as water, as strong as water is in a cataract or a flood. It was the resistance of form to formlessness, that version or vision of it seemed to clarify itself more and more as I went on. It was the defense of that same ancient enclosure in which stood the broken columns of the Roman Forum and the column in the Paris Square and of all the other such enclosures down to the domestic enclosure of my own dog and donkey. All had the same design, the marking out of a square for the experiment of liberty, of the old civic liberty or the later universal liberty. I knew, to take the domestic metaphor, that the watchdog of the West had again proved too strong for the wild dogs of the Orient. For the foes of such creative limits are the chaos and the old night, whether they are the northern barbarism that pitted tribal pride and brutal drill against the civic ideal of Paris or the eastern barbarism that brought brigands out of the wilds of Asia to sit on the throne of Byzantium. And as in the other case, what I saw was something simpler and larger than all the disputed details about the war and the peace. A man may think it extraordinary, as I do, that the natural dissolution of the artificial German empire into smaller states should have actually been prevented by its enemies when it was already accepted in despair by its friends. For we are now trying hard to hold the Prussian system together, having hammered hard for four mortal years to burst it asunder. Or he may think exactly the opposite. It makes no difference to the larger fact I have in mind. A man may think it simply topsy-turvy, as I do, that we should clear the Turks out of Turkey, but leave them in Constantinople. For that is driving the barbarians from their own rude tillage and pasture-ridge, and giving up to them our own European and Christian city. It is as if the Romans annexed Parthia but surrendered Rome. But he may think exactly the opposite, and the larger and simpler truth will still be there. It was that the weeds and wild things had been everywhere breaking into our boundaries, climbing over the northern wall or crawling through the eastern gate, so that the city would soon have been swallowed in the jungle. And whether the lines had been redrawn logically or loosely, or particular things cleared with consistency or caprice, a line has been drawn somewhere, and a clearance has been made somehow. The ancient plan of our city has been saved, a city at least capable of containing citizens. I felt this in the chance relics of the war itself. I felt it twenty times more in those older relics, which even the war had never touched at all. I felt the change as much as in the changeless east, as in the ever-changing west. I felt it when I crossed another great square in Paris to look at a certain statue which I had last seen hung with crepe and set garlands as we give the dead. And on whose plain pedestal nothing now is left but the single word, stress-board. I felt it when I saw words merely scribbled with a pencil on a wall in a poor street in Brindisi, Italia Vittorizia. But I felt it much, or even more in things infinitely more ancient and remote, in those monuments like the mountains that still seem to look down upon all modern things. For these things were more than a trophy that had been raised. They were palladium that had been rescued. These were the things that had again been saved from chaos, as they were saved at Salamis or Lepanto, and I knew what had saved them, or at least in what formation they had been saved. I knew that these scattered splendors of antiquity would hardly have descended to us at all to be endangered or delivered if all that pagan world had not crystallized into Christendom. Crossing seas as smooth as pavements and laid with turquoise and lapis lazuli, and relieved with marble mountains as clear and famous as marble statues, it was easy to feel all that had been pure and radiant, even in the long evening of paganism. But that did not make me forget what strong stars had comforted the inevitable night. The historical moral was the same, whether these marble outlines were merely the aisles seen afar off like sunset clouds by the Hebrew prophets, or were felt indeed as hellish, the great archipelago of arts and arms praised by the Greek poets. The historic heritage of both descended only to the Greek fathers. In those wild times and places the thing that preserved both was the only thing that would have permanently preserved either. It was but part of the same story when we passed the Horry Hills that held the primeval culture of Crete, and remembered that it may well have been the first home of the Philistines. It mattered the less by now whether the pagans were best represented by Poseidon, the deity, or by Dagon, the demon. It mattered the less what gods had blessed the Greeks in their youth and liberty, for I knew what God had blessed them in their despair. I knew by what sign they had survived, the long slavery under Ottoman Orientalism, and upon what name they had called in the darkness, when there was no light but the horned moon of Mahoun. If the glory of Greece has survived in some sense, I knew why it had ever survived in any sense. Where did this feeling of our fixed formation fail me when I came to the very gates of Asia and of Africa, when there rose out of the same blue seas and great harbour of Alexandria, where there had shown the pharaohs like the Star of Hellas, and where men had heard from the lifts of Hypatia the last words of Plato? I know the Christians tore Hypatia in pieces, but they did not tear Plato in pieces. The wild men that rode behind Omar the Arab would have thought nothing of tearing every page of Plato in pieces, for it is the nature of all this outer, nomadic anarchy that it is capable sooner or later of tearing anything and everything in pieces. It has no instinct of preservation or of the permanent needs of men. Where it has passed, the ruins remain ruins and are not renewed. Where it has been resisted and rolled back, the links of our long history are never lost. As I went forward, the vision of our own civilization, in the form in which it finally found unity, grew clearer and clearer. Nor did I ever know it more certainly than when I had left it behind. For the vision was that of a shape appearing and reappearing among shapeless things, and it was a shape I knew. The imagination was forced to rise into altitudes infinitely ancient and dizzy, with distance, as if into the cold colors of primeval dawns, or into the upper strata and dead spaces of a daylight older than the sun and moon. But the character of that central clearance still became clearer, and my memory turned again homewards, and I thought it was like the vision of a man flying from north-old over that little market place beside my own door, who can see nothing below him but a waste as of grey forests and the pale pattern of a cross. New Jerusalem by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 2 The Way of the Desert It may truly be said, touching the type of culture at least, that Egypt has an Egyptian lower class, a French middle class, and an English governing class. Anyhow it is true that the civilizations are stratified in this formation, or superimposed, in this order. It is the first impression produced by the darkness and density of the bizzars, the line of the lighted cafes, and the blaze of the big hotels. But it contains a much deeper truth in all three cases, and especially in the case of the French influence. It is indeed one of the first examples of what I mean by the divisions of the West becoming clearer in the ancient centers of the East. It is often said that we can only appreciate the work of England in a place like India. In so far as this is true, it is quite equally true that we can only appreciate the work of France in a place like Egypt. But this work is of a peculiar and even paradoxical kind. It is too practical to be prominent, and so universal, that it is unnoticed. The French view of the rights of man is called visionary, but in practice it is very solid and even prosaic. The French have a unique and successful trick by which French things are not accepted as French. They are accepted as human. However many foreigners played football, they would still consider football an English thing. But they do not consider fencing a French thing, though all the terms of it are still French. If a Frenchman were to label his hostury or inn, or a public house, probably written public house, we should thank him a victim of rather advanced anglomania. But when an Englishman calls it an hotel, we feel no special dread of him either as a dangerous foreigner or a dangerous lunatic. We need not recognize less readily the value of this because our own distinction is different, especially as our own distinction is being more distinguished. The spirit of the English's adventure, and it is the essence of adventure, that the adventurer does remain different from the strange tribes or strange cities which he studies because of their strangeness. He does not become like them, as did some of the Germans, or persuade them to become like him, as do most of the French. But whether we like or dislike this French capacity, or merely appreciate it properly in its place, there can be no doubt about the cause of that capacity. The cause is in the spirit that is so often regarded as wildly utopian and unreal. The cause is in the abstract creative equality and citizenship, in a possession of a political philosophy that appeals to all men. In truth, men have never looked low enough for the success of the French Revolution. They have assumed that it claims to be a sort of divine and distant thing, and therefore have not noticed it in the nearest and most materialistic things. They have watched its wavering in the Senate and never seen it walking in the streets, though it can be seen in the streets of Cairo as in the streets of Paris. In Cairo a man thinks it English to go into a tea shop, but he does not think it French to go into a cafe. And the people who go into the tea shop, the English officers and officials, are stamped as English and also stamped as official. They are generally genial, they are generally generous, but they have the detachment of a governing group and even a garrison. They cannot be mistaken for human beings. The people going to a cafe are simply human beings going to it because it is a human place. They have forgotten how much is French and how much is Egyptian in their civilization. They simply think of it as civilization. Now this character of the older French culture must be grasped because it is the clue to many things in the mystery of the modern east. I call it an old culture because as a matter of fact it runs back to the Roman culture. In this respect the Gauls really continue the work of the Romans in making something official which comes at last to be regarded as ordinary. And the great fundamental fact, which is incessantly forgotten and ought to be incessantly remembered about these cities and provinces of the Near East, is that they were once as Roman as Gaul. There is a frivolous and fanciful debate I have often had with a friend about whether it is better to find one's way or to lose it, to remember the road or forget it. I am so constituted as to be capable of losing my way in my own village and almost in my own house, and I am prepared to maintain the privilege to be a poetic one. In truth I am prepared to maintain that both attitudes are valuable and should exist side by side. So my friend and I walk side by side along the ways of the world, he being full of rich and humane sentiment because he remembers passing that way a few hundred times since his childhood, while to me existence is a perpetual fairy tale, because I have forgotten all about it. The lamppost which moves him to a tier of reminiscence rings from me a cry of astonishment, and the wall which to him is as historic as a pyramid is to me as a resting and revolutionary as a barricade. Now in this I am glad to say my temperament is very English, and the difference is very typical of the two functions of the English and the French. But in practical politics the French have a certain advantage in knowing where they are and knowing it is where they have been before, it is in the Roman Empire. The position of the English in Egypt or even in Palestine is something of a paradox. The real English claim is never heard in England and never uttered by Englishmen. We do indeed hear a number of false English claims, and other English claims are rather irrelevant than false. We hear papas and hypocritical suggestions full of that which so often accompanies the sin of pride, the weakness of provinciality. We hear suggestions that the English alone can establish anywhere a reign of law, justice, mercy, purity, and all the rest of it. We also hear franker and fairer suggestions that the English have, after all, as indeed they have, embarked on a spirited and stirring adventure, and that there has been a real romance in the extending of the British Empire in strange lands. But the real case for these semi-eastern occupations is not that of extending the British Empire in strange lands, rather it is in restoring the Roman Empire in familiar lands. It is not merely breaking out of Europe in the search for something non-European. It would be much truer to call it putting Europe together again after it had been broken. It may almost be said of the Britons, considered as the most Western of Europeans, that they have so completely forgotten their own history that they have forgotten even their own rights. At any rate they have forgotten the claim that could reasonably be made for them, but which they never think of making for themselves. They have not the faintest notion, for instance, of why hundreds of years ago an English saint was taken from Egypt, or why an English king was fighting in Palestine. They merely have a vague idea that George of Cappadocia was naturalized much in the same way as George of Hanover. They almost certainly suppose that Cordy Leon in his wanderings happened to meet the king of Egypt, as Captain Cook might happen to meet the king of the cannibal islands. To understand the past connection of England with the Near East, it is necessary to understand something that lies behind Europe and even behind the Roman Empire, something that can only be conveyed by the name of the Mediterranean. When people talk, for instance, as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mohammed, as we'll be apparent later. I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it, but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion, and Christendom that was the thing invaded. An Arabian gentleman found riding on the road to Paris or hammering on the gates of Vienna can hardly complain that we have sought him out in his simple tent in the desert. The conqueror of Sicily and Spain cannot reasonably express surprise at being an object of morbid curiosity to the people of Italy and France. In the city of Cairo, the stranger feels many of the Muslim merits, but he certainly feels the militaristic character of the Muslim glories. The crown of the city is the Citadel, built by the great Saladin, but of the spoils of ancient Egyptian architecture, and that fact is, in its turn, very symbolical. The man was a great conqueror, but he certainly behaved like an invader. He spoiled the Egyptians. He broke the old temples and tombs and built his own out of fragments. Nor is this the only respect in which the Citadel of Cairo is set high like a sign in heaven. The sign is also significant, because from this suburb height the traveler first beholds the desert out of which the great conquest came. Everyone has heard the great story of the Greeks, who cried aloud in triumph when they saw the sea afar off. But it is a stranger experience to see the earth afar off, and few of us, strictly speaking, have ever seen the earth at all. In cultivated countries it is always clad as it were in green garments. The first sight of the desert is like the sight of the naked giant in the distance. The image is all the more natural because of the particular formation which it takes, at least as it borders upon the fields of Egypt, and as it is seen from the high places of Cairo. Those who have seen the desert only in pictures generally think of it as entirely flat. But this edge of it, at least, stands up on the horizon as a line of wrinkled and hollow hills, like the scalps of bald men or worse of bald women, for it is impossible not to think of such repulsive images in spite of real sublimity of the call to the imagination. There is something curiously hostile and inhuman about the first appearance of the motionless surges of that dry and dreadful sea. Afterwards, if the traveler has happened to linger here and there in the outposts of the desert, he has seen the British camp at Quintara, or the graceful French garden town of Ismailia. He comes to take the desert as a background and sometimes a beautiful background, a mirror of mighty reflections and changing colors almost as strange as the colors of the sea. But when it is first seen, abutting as it were, advancing upon the fields and gardens of humanity, then it looks indeed like an enemy, or a long line of enemies, like a line of tawny wild beasts thus halted with their heads lifted. It is the feeling that such vain and sterile sand can yet make itself into something like a mountain range, and the traveler remembers all the tragedies of the desert when he lifts up his eyes to those accursed hills from whence no help can come. But this is only a first glimpse from a city set among green fields, and it is concerned rather with what the desert has been in its relation to men than with what the desert is in itself. When the mind has grown used to its monotony, a curious change takes place which I have never seen noted or explained by the students of mental science. It may sound strange to say that monotony of its nature becomes novelty, but if anyone will try the commonest experiment of saying some ordinary word such as moon or man about fifty times, he will find that the expression has become extraordinary by sheer repetition. A man has become a strange animal with the name as queer as that of a canoe, and the moon something monstrous like the moon calf. Something of this magic of monotony is effected by the monotony of deserts, and the traveler feels as if he had entered into a secret, and was looking at everything from another side. Something of this simplification appears, I think, in the religions of the desert, especially in the religion of Islam. It explains something of the superhuman hopes that fill the desert prophets concerning the future. It explains something also about their barbarous difference to the past. Many think of the desert and its stones as old, but in one sense they are unnaturally new. They are unused and perhaps unusable. They might be the raw material of a world, only they are so raw as to be rejected. It is not easy to define this quality of something primitive, something not mature enough to be fruitful. Indeed, there is a hard simplicity about many eastern things that is as much crude as archaic. A palm tree is very like a tree drawn by a child, or by a very futuristic artist. Even a pyramid is like a mathematical figure drawn by a schoolmaster teaching children, and its very impressiveness is that of an ultimate platonic abstraction. There is something curiously simple about the shapes in which these colossal crystals of the ancient sands have been cast. It is only when we have felt something of this element, not only of simplicity but of crudity, and even in a sense of novelty, that we can begin to understand both the immensity and the insufficiency of that power that came out of the desert, the great religion of Muhammad. In the red circle of the desert, in the dark and secret place, the prophet discovers the obvious things. I do not say it merely as a snare, for obvious things are very easily forgotten, and indeed every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things. But it is true that in such a solitude men tend to take very simple ideas as if they were entirely new ideas. There is a love of concentration which comes from the lack of comparison. The lonely man looking at the lonely palm tree does see the elementary truths about the palm tree, and the elementary truths are very essential. Thus he does see that though the palm tree may be a very simple design, it was not he who designed it. It may look like a tree drawn by a child, but he is not the child who could draw it. He has not command of that magic slate on which the pictures can come to life, or of that magic green chalk of which the green lines can grow. He sees at once that a power is at work in whose presence he and the palm tree are alike little children. In other words, he is intelligent enough to believe in God, and the Muslim, the man of the desert, is intelligent enough to believe in God. But his belief is lacking in that humane complexity that comes from comparison. The man looking at the palm tree does realize the simple fact that God made it, while the man looking at the lamppost in a large modern city, can be persuaded by a hundred sophisticated circumlocutions that he made it himself. But the man in the desert cannot compare the palm tree with the lamppost, or even with all the other trees, which may be better worth looking at than the lamppost. Hence his religion, though true as far as it goes, has not the variety and vitality of the churches that were designed by men walking in the woods and orchards. I speak here of the Muslim type of religion and not of the Oriental type of ornament, which is much older than the Muslim type of religion. But even the Oriental type of ornament, admirable as it often is, is to the ornament of a Gothic cathedral, what a fossil forest is to a forest full of birds. In short, the man of the desert tends to simplify too much, and to take his first truth for the last truth. And as it is with religion, so it is with morality. He who believes in the existence of God believes in the equality of man, and it has been one of the merits of the Muslim faith, that it felt men as men, and it was not incapable of welcoming men of many different races. But here again it was so hard and crude, that its very equality was like a desert, rather than a field. Its very humanity was inhuman. But though this human sentiment is rather rudimentary, it is very real. When a man in the desert meets another man, he is really a man, the proverbial two-legged fowl without feathers. He is in absolute and elementary shape like the palm tree or the pyramid. The discoverer does not pause to consider through what gradations he may have been evolved from a camel. When the man is a mere dot in the distance, the other man does not shout at him and ask whether he had a university education, or whether he is quite sure he is purely tectonic and not Celtic or Iberian. A man is a man, and a man is a very important thing. One thing redeems the Muslim morality, which can be set over against a mountain of crimes, a considerable deposit of common sense. And the first fact of common sense is the common bond of men. There is indeed in the Muslim character also a deep and most dangerous potentiality of fanaticism, of the menace of which something may be said later. Fanaticism sounds like the flat contrary of common sense, yet curiously enough they are both sides of the same thing. The fanatic of the desert is dangerous precisely because he does take his faith as a fact, and not even as a truth in a more transcendental sense. When he does take up a mystical idea, he takes it as he takes the man or the palm tree, that is, quite literally. When he does distinguish somebody not as a man but as a Muslim, then he divides the Muslim from the non-Muslim exactly as he divides the man from the camel. But even then he recognizes the equality of men in the sense of the equality of Muslims. He does not, for instance, complicate his conscience with any sham science about races. In this he has something like an intellectual advantage over the Jew who is generally so much his intellectual superior, and even in some ways his spiritual superior. The Jew has far more moral imagination and sympathy with the subtler ideas of the soul. For instance, it is said that many Jews disbelieve in a future life, but if they did believe in a future life it would be something more worthy of the genius of Isaiah and Spinoza. The Muslim paradise is a very earthly paradise, but with all their fine apprehensions the Jews suffer from one heavy calamity, that of being a chosen race. It is the vice of any patriotism or religion, depending on race, that the individual is himself the thing to be worshiped. The individual is his own ideal and even his own idol. This fancy was fatal to the Germans. It is fatal to the Anglo-Saxons whenever any of them forswear the glorious name of Englishmen and Americans to fall into that forlorn description. This is not so when the nation is felt as a noble abstraction, of which the individual is proud in the abstract. A Frenchman is proud of France, and therefore may think himself unworthy of France. But a German is proud of being a German, and he cannot be too unworthy to be a German when he is a German. In short, mere family pride flatters every member of the family. It produced the arrogance of the Germans, and it is capable of producing a much subtler kind of arrogance in the Jews. From this particular sort of self-deception the more savage man of the desert is free. If he is not considering somebody as a Muslim, he will consider him as a man. At the price of something like barbarism, he has at least been saved from ethnology. But here again, the obvious is a limit as well as a light to him. It does not permit, for instance, anything fine or subtle in the sentiment of sex. Islam asserts admirably the equality of men, but it is the equality of males. No one can deny that a noble dignity is possible even to the poorest, who has seen the Arab coming in from the desert to the cities of Palestine or Egypt. No one can deny that men whose rags are dropping off their bags can bear themselves, in a way befitting kings or prophets, in the great stories of scripture. No one can be surprised that so many fine artists have delighted to draw such models on the spot and to make realistic studies for illustrations to the old and new Testaments. On the road to Cairo, one may see twenty groups, exactly like that of the holy family, in the pictures of the flight into Egypt, with only one difference. The man is riding on the ass. In the east it is the male who is dignified and even ceremonial. Possibly that is why he wears skirts. I pointed out long ago that petty coach, with some regard as a garb of humiliation for women, are really regarded as the only garb of magnificence for men when they wish to be something more than men. They are worn by kings, by priests, by judges. The male Muslim, especially in his own family, is the king and the priest and the judge. I do not mean merely that he is the master, as many would say, of the male in the many Western societies, especially simple and self-governing societies. I mean something more. I mean that he has not only the kingdom and the power about the glory, and even as it were the glamour. I mean he has not only the rough leadership that we often give to the man, but the special sort of social beauty and statelyness that we generally expect only of the woman. What we mean when we say that an ambitious man wants to have a fine woman at the head of the dinner table, that the Muslim world really means when it expects to see a fine man at the head of the house. Even in the street he is the peacock, colored much more splendidly than the peahen. Even when clad in comparatively sober and partly European costume, as outside the cafes of Cairo and the great cities, he exhibits this indefinable character not merely of dignity but of pomp. It can be traced, even in the tarbush, the minimum of Turkish attire worn by all the commercial classes. The thing more commonly called in England the Fez. The Fez is not a sort of smoking-cap, it is a tower of scarlet often tall enough to be the headdress of a priest, and it is a hat one cannot take off to a lady. This fact is familiar enough in talk about Muslim and Oriental life generally, but I only repeat it in order to refer back to the same simplification which is the advantage and disadvantage of the philosophy of the desert. Rivalry is not an obvious idea. It is not as plain as a pike-staff or as a palm-tree. It is a delicate balance between the sexes which gives the rarest and most poetic kind of pleasure to those who can strike it, but it is not self-evident to a savage merely because he is also a sane man. It often seems to him, as much a part of his own coarse common sense, that all the fame and fun should go to the sex that is stronger and less tied, as that all the authority should go to the parents rather than the children. Pity for weakness he can understand, and the Muslim is quite capable of giving royal alms to a cripple or an orphan, but reverence for weakness is to him simply meaningless. It is a mystical idea that is to him no more than a mystery, but the same is true touching what may be called the lighter side of the more civilized sentiment. This hard and literal view of life gives no place for that slight element of magnanimous sort of play-acting which has run through all our tales of true lovers in the West. Whenever there is chivalry there is courtesy, and wherever there is courtesy there is comedy. There is no comedy in the desert. Another quite logical and consistent element in the very logical and consistent creed we call Mohammedism is the element that we call vandalism. Since such few and obvious things alone are vital, and since a half-artistic, half-antequarian affection is not one of these things and cannot be called obvious, it is largely left out. It is very difficult to say in a few well-chosen words exactly what is now the use of the pyramids. Before Saladin, the great Saracen warrior, simply stripped the pyramids to build a military fortress on the heights of Cairo. It is a little difficult to define exactly what is a man's duty to the Sphinx, and therefore the Mamalukes used it entirely as a target. There was little in them of that double feeling full of pathos and irony which divided the hearts of the primitive Christians in presence of the great pagan literature and art. This is not concerned with brutal outbreaks of revenge which may be found on both sides, or with chivalrous caprices of toleration which may also be found on both sides. It is concerned with the inmost mentality of the two religions, which must be understood in order to do justice to either. The Muslim mind never tended to that mystical mode of loving yet leaving, with which Augustine cried aloud upon his ancient beauty, or Dante said farewell to Virgil when he left him in the limbo of the pagans. The Muslim traditions, unlike the medieval legends, do not suggest the image of a knight who kissed Venus before he killed her. We see, in all the Christian ages, this combination which is not a compromise, but rather a complexity made by two contrary enthousiasms, as when the Dark Ages copied out the pagan poems while denying the pagan legends, or when the popes of the Renaissance imitated the Greek temples while denying the Greek gods. This high inconsistency is inconsistent with Islam. Islam, as I have said, takes everything literally, and does not know how to play with anything. And the cause of the contrast is the historical cause of which we must be conscious on all studies of this kind. The Christian church had, from a very early date, the idea of reconstructing a whole civilization, and even a complex civilization. It was the attempt to make a new balance, which differed from the old balance of the Stoics of Rome, but which could not afford to lose its balance any more than they. It differed because the old system was one of many religions under one government, while the new one was one of many governments under one religion. But the idea of variety in unity remained, though it was, in a sense, reversed. A historical instinct made the man of the New Europe try hard to find a place for everything in the system, however much might be denied to the individual. Christians might lose everything, but Christendom, if possible, must not lose anything. The very nature of Islam, even at its best, was quite different from this. Nobody supposed, even subconsciously, that Muhammad meant to restore ancient Babylon as medievalism vaguely sought to restore ancient Rome. Nobody thought that the builders of the mosque of Omar had looked at the pyramids as the builders of St. Peter's might have looked at the Parthenon. Islam began at the beginning. It was content with the idea that it had a great truth, as indeed it had a colossal truth. It was so huge a truth that it was hard to see. It was a half-truth. Islam was a movement. That is why it is ceased to move. For a movement can only be a mood. It may be a very necessary movement arising from a very noble mood, but sooner or later it must find its level in a larger philosophy and be balanced against other things. Islam was a reaction toward simplicity. It was a violent simplification, which turned out to be an oversimplification. Stevenson has somewhere one of his perfectly picked phrases for an empty-minded man that he has not one thought to rub against another while he waits for a train. The Muslim had one thought and that a most vital one, the greatness of God, which levels all men. But the Muslim had not one thought to rub against another because he really had not another. It is the friction of the two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of the substance and symbol from which the mind takes fire. The creeds, condemned as complex, have something like the secret of sex. They can breathe thoughts. An idealistic, intellectual remark recently that there were a great many things in the creed for which he had no use. He might just as well have said there were a great many things in the Encyclopedia Britannica for which he had no use. It would probably have occurred to him that the working question was meant for humanity and not for him. But even in the case of the Encyclopedia it will often be found a stimulating exercise to read two articles on two widely different subjects and note where they touch. In fact there is really a great deal to be said for the man in Pickwick who read about China and then about metaphysics and combined his information. But however this may be in the famous case of Chinese metaphysics, it is this which is chiefly lacking in Arabian metaphysics. They suffer, as I have said, of the palm tree in the desert, from a lack of the vitality that comes from complexity and of the complexity that comes from comparison. They suffer from having been in a single movement in a single direction, from having begun as a mood and ended rather as a mode, that is a mere custom or fashion. But any modern Christian, thus criticizing the Moslem movement, will do well to criticize himself and his world at the same time. For in truth most modern things are mere movements in the same sense as the Moslem movement. They are at best fashions in which one thing is exaggerated because it has been neglected. They are at worst mere monomanias in which everything is neglected, that one thing may be exaggerated. Good or bad they are alike movements in which their nature can only move for a certain distance and then stop. Feminism, for instance, is in its nature a movement, and one that must stop somewhere. But the suffragettes no more established a philosophy of the sexes by their feminism than the Arabs did by their anti-feminism. A woman can find her home on the hustings, even less than in the harem, but such movements do not really attempt to find a final home for anybody or anything. The Moslem is a movement, and in my opinion a very natural and just movement, considered as a revolt against the crude cruelty of capitalism. But when we find the Bolshevists making a rule that the drama must encourage the proletarian spirit, it is obvious that those who say so are not only maniacs, but what is more to the point here are monomaniacs. Imagine having to apply that principle, let us say, to Charlie's aunt. None of these things seek to establish a complete philosophy such as Aquinas founded on Aristotle. The only two modern men who attempted it were Comtey and Herbert Spencer. Spencer, I think, was too small a man to do it at all, and Comtey was a great enough man to show how difficult it is to do in modern times. None of these movements can do anything but move. They have not discovered where to rest. This fact brings us back to the man in the desert, who moves and does not rest, but who has many superiorities to the restless races of the industrial city. Men who have been in the Manchester movement in 1860 and the Fabian movement in 1880 cannot sneer at a religious mood that lasted for eight hundred years, and those who tolerate the degraded homelessness of the slums cannot despise the much more dignified homelessness of the desert. Nevertheless the thing is a homelessness and not a home, and that runs through it all the note of the nomad. The Moslem takes literally, as he takes everything, the truth that here we have no abiding city. He can see no meaning in the mysticism of materialism, the sacramental idea that a French poet expressed so nobly when he said that our earthly city is the body of the city of God. He has no true notion of building a house or in our western sense of recognizing the kindred points of heaven and home. Even the exception to this rule is an exception at once terrible and touching. There is one house that the Moslem does build like a house and even a home, often with walls and a roof and a door, as square as a cottage, as solid as a fort, and that is his grave. A Moslem cemetery is literally like a little village. It is a village, as the saying goes, that one would not care to walk through at night. There is something singularly creepy about so strange a street of houses, each with a door that might be opened by a dead man. But in a less fanciful sense there is about it something profoundly pathetic and human. Here indeed is the sailor, home from the sea. In the only port he will ever consent to call his home. Here at last the nomad confesses the common need of men. But even about this there broods the presence of the desert and its dry bones of reason. He will accept nothing between a tent and a tomb. The philosophy of the desert can only begin over again. It cannot grow, it cannot have what Protestants call progress and Catholics call development. There is death and hell in the desert when it does begin over again. There is always the possibility that new prophet will rediscover the old truth, will find again written on the red sands the secret of the obvious, but it will always be the same secret, for which thousands of these simple and serious and splendidly valiant men will die. The highest message of Muhammad is a piece of divine tautology. The very cry that God is God is a repetition of the word, like the repetition of wide sands and rolling skies. The very phrase is like an everlasting echo that can never cease to say the same sacred word. And when I saw afterwards the mightiest and most magnificent of all the mosques of that land, I found that its inscriptions had the same character of a deliberate and defiant sameness. The ancient Arabic alphabet and script is itself at once so elegant and so exact that it can be used as a fixed ornament like the egg and dark pattern or the Greek key. It is as if we could make a heraldry of handwriting or cover a wallpaper with signatures, but the literary style is as recurrent as the decorative style, perhaps that is why it can be used as a decorative style. Phrases are repeated again and again like ornamental stars or flowers. Many modern people, for example, imagine that the Athanasian creed is full of vain repetitions, but that is because people are too lazy to listen to it or not lose it enough to understand it. The same terms are used throughout as they are in a proposition of Euclid, but the steps are all as differentiated and progressive as in a proposition of Euclid. But in the inscriptions of the mosque whole sentences seem to occur not like the steps of an argument, but rather like the chorus of a song. This is the impression everywhere produced by this spirit of the sandy wastes. This is the voice of the desert through the mausine cries from the high turrets of the city. The one is driven to repeating oneself about the repetition, so overpowering is the impression of the tall horizons of those tremendous plains, brooding upon the soul with all the solemn weight of this self-evident. There is indeed another aspect of the desert, yet more ancient and momentous, of which I may speak. But here I only deal with its effect on this great religion of simplicity, for it is through the atmosphere of that religion that a man makes his way, as so many pilgrims have done, to the goal of this pilgrimage. Also this particular aspect remained the more sharply in my memory because of the suddenness with which I escaped from it. I had not expected the contrast, and it may have colored all my after-experiences. I descended from the desert train at Lud, which had all the look of a large camp in the desert, appropriately enough perhaps, for it is the traditional birthplace of the soldier St. George. At the moment, however, there was nothing rousing or romantic about its appearance. It was perhaps unusually dreary, for heavy rain had fallen and the water stood about in what is easier to call large puddles than anything so poetic as small pools. A motor-car sent by friends had halted beside the platform. I got into it with a not unusual vagueness about where I was going, and it wound its way up my repads to a more rolling stretch of country with patches of cactus here and there. And then, with the curious abruptness, I became conscious that the whole huge desert had vanished, and I was in a new land. The dark red plains had rolled away like an enormous nightmare, and I found myself in a fresh and exceedingly pleasant dream. I know it will seem fanciful, but for a moment I really felt as if I had come home, or rather to that home behind home for which we are all home sick. The lost memory of it is the life at once of faith and a fairy tale. Groves glowing with oranges rose behind hedges of grotesque cactus or prickly pear, which really looked like green dragons guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides. On each side of the road were such flowers as I had never seen before under the sun. For indeed they seemed to have the sun in them rather than the sun on them. Clusters and crowds of crimson anemones were of a red knot to be symbolized in blood or wine, but rather in the red glass that glows in the window dedicated to a martyr. Only in a wild eastern tale could one picture a pilgrim or traveler finding such a garden in the desert. And I thought of the oldest tale of all, and the garden from which we came. But there was something in it yet more subtle, which there must be in the impression of any earthly paradise. It is vital to such a dream that things familiar should be mixed with things fantastic, as when an actual dream is filled with the faces of old friends. Sparrows which seemed to be the same all over the world were darting hither and thither among the flowers. And I had the fancy that they were the souls of the town and sparrows of London and the smoky cities. And now gone wherever the good sparrows go. And a little way up the road before me on the hill between the cactus hedges I saw a gray donkey trotting, and I could almost have sworn that it was the donkey I had left at home. He was trotting on ahead of me, and the outline of his erect and delfish ears was dark against the sky. He was evidently going somewhere with great determination, and I thought I knew to what appropriate place he was going, and that it was my fate to follow him like a moving omen. I lost sight of him later, for I had to complete the journey by train, but the train followed the same direction, which was up steeper and steeper hills. I began to realize more clearly where I was, and to know that the garden in the desert that had bloomed so subtly about me had borne for many desert wanderers the name of the promised land. As the rocks rose higher and higher on every side and hung over us like terrible and tangible clouds, I saw in the dim grass of the slopes below them something I had never seen before. It was a rainbow fallen on the earth, with no part of it against the sky, but only the grasses and the flowers shining through its fine shades of fiery color. I thought this also was like an omen, and in such a mood of vital mysticism there fell upon me another accident, which I was content to count for a third. For when the train stopped at the last in the rain, and there was no other vehicle for the last lap of the journey, a very courteous officer, an army surgeon, gave me a seat in an ambulance wagon, and it was under the shield of the Red Cross that I entered Jerusalem. For suddenly between a post of the wagon and a rack of rainy cloud I saw it uplifted and withdrawn under all the arching heavens of its history, alone with its benediction and its blasphemy. The city that is set upon a hill and cannot be hid.