They are generally genial, they are generally generous, but they
have the detachment of a governing group and even a garrison.
They cannot be mistaken for human beings. The people going to a cafe
are simply human beings going to it because it is a human place.
They have forgotten how much is French and how much Egyptian
in their civilisation; they simply think of it as civilisation.
Now this character of the older French culture must be grasped because
it is the clue to many things in the mystery of the modern East.
I call it an old culture because as a matter of fact it runs back
to the Roman culture. In this respect the Gauls really continue
the work of the Romans, in making something official which comes
at last to be regarded as ordinary. And the great fundamental fact
which is incessantly forgotten and ought to be incessantly remembered,
about these cities and provinces of the near East, is that they
were once as Roman as Gaul.

There is a frivolous and fanciful debate I have often had with a friend,
about whether it is better to find one's way or to lose it, to remember
the road or to forget it. I am so constituted as to be capable
of losing my way in my own village and almost in my own house.
And I am prepared to maintain the privilege to be a poetic one.
In truth I am prepared to maintain that both attitudes are valuable,
and should exist side by side. And so my friend and I walk side by side
along the ways of the world, he being full of a rich and humane sentiment,
because he remembers passing that way a few hundred times since
his childhood; while to me existence is a perpetual fairy-tale,
because I have forgotten all about it. The lamp-post which moves
him to a tear of reminiscence wrings from me a cry of astonishment;
and the wall which to him is as historic as a pyramid is to me
as arresting and revolutionary as a barricade. Now in this,