The New Jerusalem | Page 8

all
modern things. For these things were more than a trophy that had been
raised, they were a palladium that had been rescued. These were the
things that had again been saved from chaos, as they were saved at
Salamis and Lepanto; and I knew what had saved them or at least in
what formation they had been saved. I knew that these scattered
splendours of antiquity would hardly have descended to us at all, to be
endangered or delivered, if all that pagan world had not crystallised
into Christendom.
Crossing seas as smooth as pavements inlaid 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

isles" seen afar off like sunset clouds by the Hebrew prophets, or were
felt indeed as Hellas, 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 hoary 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
Mahound. If the glory of Greece has survived in some sense, I knew
why it had ever survived in any sense. Nor 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 the great harbour of
Alexandria; where had shone the Pharos like the star of Hellas, and
where men had heard from the lips 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 civilisation, 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 colours 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 clearer. And
my memory turned again homewards; and I thought it was like the
vision of a man flying from Northolt, 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.

CHAPTER II
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 civilisations are stratified in
this formation, or superimposed in this order. It is the first impression
produced by the darkness and density of the bazaars, 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