If the glory of Greece has survived in some sense, I knew why it
had ever survived in any sense. Nor did this feeling of our fixed
formation fail me when I came to the very gates of Asia and of Africa;
when there rose out of the same blue seas the great harbour of Alexandria;
where had shone the Pharos like the star of Hellas, and where men
had heard from the lips of Hypatia the last words of Plato.
I know the Christians tore Hypatia in pieces; but they did not tear
Plato in pieces. The wild men that rode behind Omar the Arab would
have thought nothing of tearing every page of Plato in pieces.
For it is the nature of all this outer nomadic anarchy that it is
capable sooner or later of tearing anything and everything in pieces;
it has no instinct of preservation or of the permanent needs of men.
Where it has passed the ruins remain ruins and are not renewed;
where it has been resisted and rolled back, the links of our long
history are never lost. As I went forward the vision of our
own civilisation, in the form in which it finally found unity,
grew clearer and clearer; nor did I ever know it more certainly
than when I had left it behind.

For the vision was that of a shape appearing and reappearing among
shapeless things; and it was a shape I knew. The imagination was forced
to rise into altitudes infinitely ancient and dizzy with distance,
as if into the cold colours of primeval dawns, or into the upper
strata and dead spaces of a daylight older than the sun and moon.
But the character of that central clearance still became clearer
and clearer. And my memory turned again homewards; and I thought it
was like the vision of a man flying from Northolt, over that little
market-place beside my own door; who can see nothing below him
but a waste as of grey forests, and the pale pattern of a cross.