, as if disappearing into the sun; and save for the noise
of the train there was no sound in all that grey and silver solitude;
not even the sound of a bird. Yet 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.
A million 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 has presented to the modern world a new problem of labour
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 lux_; 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 labour and liberty; and thought it worth
while 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 civilisation.
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 a 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 has 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 distance, 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