One of the adventures of travel consists, not so much in finding that popular sayings are false, as that they mean more than they say.  We cannot appreciate the full force of the phrase until we have seen the fact.  We make a picture of the things we do not know out of the things we know; and suppose the traveller’s tale to mean no more abroad than it would at home.  If a man acquainted only with English churches is told about certain French churches that they are much frequented, he makes an English picture.  He imagines a definite dense crowd of people in their best clothes going all together at eleven o’clock, and all coming back together to lunch.  He does not picture the peculiar impression he would gain on the spot; of chance people going in and out of the church all day, sometimes for quite short periods, as if it were a sort of sacred inn.  Or suppose a man knowing only English beer-shops hears for the first time of a German beer-garden, he probably does not imagine the slow ritual of the place.  He does not know that unless the drinker positively slams down the top of his beer-mug with a resounding noise and a decisive gesture, beer will go on flowing into it as from a natural fountain; the drinking of beer being regarded as the normal state of man, and the cessation of it a decisive and even dramatic departure.  I do not give this example in contempt; heaven forbid.  I have had so much to say of the inhuman side of Prussianised Germany that I am glad to be able to pay a passing tribute to those more generous German traditions which we hope may revive and make Germany once more a part of Christendom.  I merely give it as an instance of the way in which things we have all heard of, like church-going or beer-drinking, in foreign lands, mean much more, and something much more special, than we should infer from our own land.  Now this is true of a phrase we have all heard of deserted cities or temples in the Near East:  “The Bedouins camp in the ruins.”  When I have read a hundred times that Arabs camp in some deserted town or temple near the Nile or the Euphrates, I always thought of gipsies near some place like Stonehenge.  They would make their own rude shelter near the stones, perhaps sheltering behind them to light a fire; and for the rest, generations of gipsies might camp there without making much difference.  The thing I saw more than once in Egypt and Palestine was much more curious.  It was as if the gipsies set to work to refurnish Stonehenge and make it a commodious residence.  It was as if they spread a sort of giant umbrella over the circle of stones, and elaborately hung curtains between them, so as to turn the old Druid temple into a sort of patchwork pavilion.  In one sense there is much more vandalism, and in another sense much more practicality; but it is a practicality that always stops short of the true creative independence of going off and building a house of their own.  That is the attitude of the Arab; and it runs through all his history.  Noble as is his masterpiece of the Mosque of Omar, there is something about it of that patchwork pavilion.  It was based on Christian work, it was built with fragments, it was content with things that fastidious architects call fictions or even shams.