And You Turn
Away From The Bright Paintings, And Down There You See The King.
Many years ago in London I went to the private view of the Royal
Academy at Burlington House.
I went in the afternoon, when the
galleries were crowded with politicians and artists, with dealers,
gossips, quidnuncs, and /flaneurs/; with authors, fashionable lawyers,
and doctors; with men and women of the world; with young dandies and
actresses /en vogue/. A roar of voices went up to the roof. Every one
was talking, smiling, laughing, commenting, and criticizing. It was a
little picture of the very worldly world that loves the things of
to-day and the chime of the passing hours. And suddenly some people
near me were silent, and some turned their heads to stare with a
strangely fixed attention. And I saw coming toward me an emaciated
figure, rather bent, much drawn together, walking slowly on legs like
sticks. It was clad in black, with a gleam of color. Above it was a
face so intensely thin that it was like the face of death. And in this
face shone two eyes that seemed full of - the other world. And, like a
breath from the other world passing, this man went by me and was
hidden from me by the throng. It was Cardinal Manning in the last days
of his life.
The face of the king is like his, but it has an even deeper pathos as
it looks upward to the rock. And the king's silence bids you be
silent, and his immobility bids you be still. And his sad, and
unutterable resignation sifts awe, as by the desert wind the sand is
sifted into the temples, into the temple of your heart. And you feel
the touch of time, but the touch of eternity, too. And as, in that
rock-hewn sanctuary, you whisper "/Pax vobiscum/," you say it for all
the world.
XIV
EDFU
Prayer pervades the East. Far off across the sands, when one is
traveling in the desert, one sees thin minarets rising toward the sky.
A desert city is there. It signals its presence by this mute appeal to
Allah. And where there are no minarets - in the great wastes of the
dunes, in the eternal silence, the lifelessness that is not broken
even by any lonely, wandering bird - the camels are stopped at the
appointed hours, the poor, and often ragged, robes are laid down, the
brown pilgrims prostrate themselves in prayer. And the rich man
spreads his carpet, and prays. And the half-naked nomad spreads
nothing; but he prays, too. The East is full of lust and full of
money-getting, and full of bartering, and full of violence; but it is
full of worship - of worship that disdains concealment, that recks not
of ridicule or comment, that believes too utterly to care if others
disbelieve. There are in the East many men who do not pray. They do
not laugh at the man who does, like the unpraying Christian.
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