tage
of the philosophy of the desert. Chivalry 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 Moslem 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 civilised sentiment. This hard and literal view of life gives
no place for that slight element of a magnanimous sort of play-acting,
which has run through all our tales of true lovers in the West.
Wherever 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 Mahometanism, is the element
that we call Vandalism. Since such few and obvious things alone
are vital, and since a half-artistic half-antiquarian 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.
Therefore 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 Mamelukes 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 Moslem mind never tended to that mystical mode of "loving yet leaving"
with which A