They would not have built Stonehenge; how much less Salisbury
or Glastonbury or Lincoln.
That is the element about the Arab influence which makes it,
after its ages of supremacy and in a sense of success, remain in a
subtle manner superficial. When a man first sees the Eastern deserts,
he sees this influence as I first described it, very present
and powerful, almost omnipresent and omnipotent. But I fancy that to me
and to others it is partly 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.
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