lf has done. In the West the past of Christendom
has its perspective blocked up by its own creations; in the East
it is a true perspective of interminable corridors, with round
Byzantine arches and proud Byzantine pillars. That, I incline
to fancy, is the real difference that a man come from the west
of Europe feels in the east of Europe, it is a gap or a void.
It is the absence of the grotesque energy of Gothic, the absence
of the experiments of parliament and popular representation,
the absence of medieval chivalry, the absence of modern nationality.
In the East the civilisation lived on, or if you will, lingered on;
in the West it died and was reborn. But for a long time, it should
be remembered, it must have seemed to the East merely that it died.
The realms of Rome had disappeared in clouds of barbaric war,
while the realms of Byzantium were still golden and gorgeous in the sun.
The men of the East did not realise that their splendour was stiffening
and growing sterile, and even the early successes of Islam may not
have revealed to them that their rule was not only stiff but brittle.
It was something else that was destined to reveal it.
The Crusades meant many things; but in this matter they meant one thing,
which was like a word carried to them on the great west wind.
And the word was like that in an old Irish song: "The west is awake."
They heard in the distance the cries of unknown crowds and felt
the earth shaking with the march of mobs; and behind them came
the trampling of horses and the noise of harness and of horns of war;
new kings calling out commands and hosts of young men full of hope
crying out in the old Roman tongue "Id Deus vult," Rome was risen
from the dead.

Almost any traveller could select out of the countless things
that he has looked at the few things that he has seen.
I mean the things that come to him with a curious clearness;
so that he actually sees them to be what he knows them to be.
I might almost say that he can believe in them although he has seen them.
There can be no rule about this realisation; it seems to come in
the most random fashion; and the man to whom it comes can only speak
for himself without any attempt at a critical comparison with others.
In this sense I may say that the Church of the Nativity at
Bethlehem contains something impossible to describe, yet driving
me beyond expression to a desperate attempt at description.
The church is entered through a door so smal