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.
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