artly striking only because it is strange.
Islam is so different to Christendom that to see it at all is at
first like entering a new world. But, in my own case at any rate,
as the strange colours became more customary, and especially as I saw
more of the established seats of history, the cities and the framework
of the different states, I became conscious of something else.
It was something underneath, undestroyed and even in a sense unaltered.
It was something neither Moslem nor modern; not merely oriental and yet
very different from the new occidental nations from which I came.
For a long time I could not put a name to this historical atmosphere.
Then one day, standing in one of the Greek churches, one of those houses
of gold full of hard highly coloured pictures, I fancied it came to me.
It was the Empire. And certainly not the raid of Asiatic bandits
we call the Turkish Empire. The thing which had caught my eye
in that coloured interior was the carving of a two-headed eagle
in such a position as to make it almost as symbolic as a cross.
Every one has heard, of course, of the situation which this might well
suggest, the suggestion that the Russian Church was far too much of an
Established Church and the White Czar encroached upon the White Christ.
But as a fact the eagle I saw was not borrowed from the Russian Empire;
it would be truer to say that the Empire was borrowed from the eagle.
The double eagle is the ancient emblem of the double empire of Rome
and of Byzantium; the one head looking to the west and the other to
the east, as if it spread its wings from the sunrise to the sunset.
Unless I am mistaken, it was only associated with Russia as late
as Peter the Great, though it had been the badge of Austria
as the representative of the Holy Roman Empire. And what I
felt brooding over that shrine and that landscape was something
older not only than Turkey or Russia but than Austria itself.
I began to understand a sort of evening light that lies over
Palestine and Syria; a sense of smooth ruts of custom such
as are said to give a dignity to the civilisation of China.
I even understood a sort of sleepiness about the splendid and
handsome Orthodox priests moving fully robed about the streets.
They were not aristocrats but officials; still moving with the mighty
routine of some far-off official system. In so far as the eagle was
an emblem not of such imperial peace but of distant imperial wars,
it was of wars that