a tall building, and on my way home at night I often stop to read a bit
before its windows. When my eyes leave my book and wander to the view of
the roofs, I fancy that the giant hands of a phrenologist are feeling the
buildings which are the bumps of the city. And listening, I seem to hear
his dictum "Vanity"; for below is the market of fashion. The world has
sunk to ankle height. I sit on the shoulders of the world, above the
tar-and-gravel scum of the city. And at my back are the books--the past,
all that has been, the manners of dress and thought--they too peeping
aslant through these windows. Soon it will be dark and this day also will
be done and burn its ceremonial candles; and the roar from the pavement
will be the roar of yesterday.

Astronomy would have come much later if it had not been for the flat roofs
of the Orient and its glistening nights. In the cloudy North, where the
roofs were thatched or peaked, the philosophers slept indoors tucked to
the chin. But where the nights were hot, men, banished from sleep, watched
the rising of the stars that they might point the hours. They studied the
recurrence of the star patterns until they knew when to look for their
reappearance. It was under a cloudless, breathless sky that the
constellations were named and their measures and orbits allotted. On the
flat roof of some Babylonian temple of Bel came into life astrology,
"foolish daughter of a wise mother," that was to bind the eyes of the
world for nearly two thousand years, the most enduring and the strongest
of superstitions. It was on these roofs, too, that the planets were first
maligned as wanderers, celestial tramps; and this gossip continued until
recent years when at last it appeared that they are bodies of regular and
irreproachable habits, eccentric in appearance only, doing a cosmic beat
with a time-clock at each end, which they have never failed to punch at
the proper moment.

Somewhere, if I could but find it, must exist a diary of one of these
ancient astronomers--and from it I quote in anticipation. "Early this
night to my roof," it runs, "the heavens being bare of clouds (_coelo
aperto_). Set myself to measure the elevation of Sagittarius Alpha with my
new astrolabe sent me by my friend and master, Hafiz, from out Arabia. Did
this night compute the equation a=(Dx/2T)f(a, b c T_3). Thus did I prove
the variations of the ellipse and show Hassan Sabah to be the mule he is.
Then rested, pacing my roof e