ingularly creepy about so strange a street
of houses, each with a door that might be opened by a dead man.
But in a less fanciful sense, there is about it something profoundly
pathetic and human. Here indeed is the sailor home from sea,
in the only port he will consent to call his home; here at last
the nomad confesses the common need of men. But even about this
there broods the presence of the desert and its dry bones of reason.
He will accept nothing between a tent and a tomb.

The philosophy of the desert can only begin over again.
It cannot grow; it cannot have what Protestants call progress
and Catholics call development. There is death and hell
in the desert when it does begin over again. There is always
the possibility that a new prophet will rediscover the old truth;
will find again written on the red sands the secret of the obvious.
But it will always be the same secret, for which thousands
of these simple and serious and splendidly valiant men will die.
The highest message of Mahomet is a piece of divine tautology.
The very cry that God is God is a repetition of words, like the
repetitions of wide sands and rolling skies. The very phrase is like
an everlasting echo, that can never cease to say the same sacred word;
and when I saw afterwards the mightiest and most magnificent
of all the mosques of that land, I found that its inscriptions
had the same character of a deliberate and defiant sameness.
The ancient Arabic alphabet and script is itself at once so elegant
and so exact that it can be used as a fixed ornament, like the egg
and dart pattern or the Greek key. It is as if we could make
a heraldry of handwriting, or cover a wall-paper with signatures.
But the literary style is as recurrent as the decorative style;
perhaps that is why it can be used as a decorative style.
Phrases are repeated again and again like ornamental stars or flowers.
Many modern people, for example, imagine that the Athanasian Creed
is full of vain repetitions; but that is because people are too lazy
to listen to it, or not lucid enough to understand it. The same
terms are used throughout, as they are in a proposition of Euclid.
But the steps are all as differentiated and progressive as in a
proposition of Euclid. But in the inscriptions of the Mosque whole
sentences seem to occur, not like the steps of an argument, but rather
like the chorus of a song. This is the impression everywhere produced
by this spirit of the sandy