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 we in the West have hardly heard of;
it was the emblem of official ovations.
When Heracleius rode homewards from the rout of Ispahan With
the captives dragged behind him and the eagles in the van.
That is the rigid reality that still underlay the light mastery
of the Arab rider; that is what a man sees, in the patchwork pavilion,
when he grows used to the coloured canvas and looks at the walls
of stone. This also was far too great a thing for facile praise
or blame, a vast bureaucracy busy and yet intensely dignified,
the most civilised thing ruling many other civilisations.
It was an endless end of the world; for ever repeating its rich finality.
And I myself was still walking in that long evening of the earth;
and Caesar my lord was at Byzantium.
But it is necessary to remember next that this empire was not
always at its evening.
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