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 wastes; this is the voice of the desert,
though the muezzin cries from the high turrets of the city.
Indeed one is driven to repeating oneself about the repetition,
so overpowering is the impression of the tall horizons of those
tremendous plains, brooding upon the soul with all the solemn weight
of the self-evident.

There is indeed another aspect of the desert, yet more ancient
and momentous, of which I may speak; but here I only deal
with its effect on this great religion of simplicity. For it is
through the atmosphere of that religion that a man makes his way,
as so many pilgrims have done, to the goal of this pilgrimage.
Also this particular aspect remained the more sharply in my memory
because of the suddenness with which I escaped from it. I had not