sociations.
The truth is that, upon a more transcendental consideration,
we do not know what place is any more than we know what time is.
We do not know of the unknown powers that they cannot concentrate
in space as in time, or find in a spot something that corresponds
to a crisis. And if this be felt everywhere, it is necessarily
and abnormally felt in those alleged holy places and sacred spots.
It is felt supremely in all those lands of the Near East which lie
about the holy hill of Zion.

In these lands an impression grows steadily on the mind much too
large for most of the recent religious or scientific definitions.
The bogus heraldry of Haeckel is as obviously insufficient as any
quaint old chronicle tracing the genealogies of English kings through
the chiefs of Troy to the children of Noah. There is no difference,
except that the tale of the Dark Ages can never be proved,
while the travesty of the Darwinian theory can sometimes be disproved.
But I should diminish my meaning if I suggested it as a mere
score in the Victorian game of Scripture versus Science.
Some much larger mystery veils the origins of man than most partisans
on either side have realised; and in these strange primeval plains
the traveller does realise it. It was never so well expressed
as by one of the most promising of those whose literary possibilities
were gloriously broken off by the great war; Lieutenant Warre-Cornish
who left a strange and striking fragment, about a man who came
to these lands with a mystical idea of forcing himself back
against the stream of time into the very fountain of creation.
This is a parenthesis; but before resuming the more immediate
matter of the supernormal tricks of the tribes of the East,
it is well to recognise this very real if much more general historic
impression about the particular lands in which they lived.
I have called it a historic impression; but it might more truly be called
a prehistoric impression. It is best expressed in symbol by saying
that the legendary site of the Garden of Eden is in Mesopotamia.
It is equally well expressed in concrete experience by saying that,
when I was in these parts, a learned man told me that the primitive form
of wheat had just, for the first time, been discovered in Palestine.

The feeling that fills the traveller may be faintly suggested thus;
that here, in this legendary land between Asia and Europe, may well
have happened whatever did happen; that through