of those houses of gold full of hard highly coloured pictures, I fancied it came to me.  It was the Empire.  And certainly not the raid of Asiatic bandits we call the Turkish Empire.  The thing which had caught my eye in that coloured interior was the carving of a two-headed eagle in such a position as to make it almost as symbolic as a cross.  Every one has heard, of course, of the situation which this might well suggest, the suggestion that the Russian Church was far too much of an Established Church and the White Czar encroached upon the White Christ.  But as a fact the eagle I saw was not borrowed from the Russian Empire; it would be truer to say that the Empire was borrowed from the eagle.  The double eagle is the ancient emblem of the double empire of Rome and of Byzantium; the one head looking to the west and the other to the east, as if it spread its wings from the sunrise to the sunset.  Unless I am mistaken, it was only associated with Russia as late as Peter the Great, though it had been the badge of Austria as the representative of the Holy Roman Empire.  And what I felt brooding over that shrine and that landscape was something older not only than Turkey or Russia but than Austria itself.  I began to understand a sort of evening light that lies over Palestine and Syria; a sense of smooth ruts of custom such as are said to give a dignity to the civilisation of China.  I even understood a sort of sleepiness about the splendid and handsome Orthodox priests moving fully robed about the streets.  They were not aristocrats but officials; still moving with the mighty routine of some far-off official system.  In so far as the eagle was an emblem not of such imperial peace but of distant imperial wars, it was of wars that we in the West have hardly heard of; it was the emblem of official ovations.

When Heracleius rode homewards from the rout of Ispahan With the captives dragged behind him and the eagles in the van.

That is the rigid reality that still underlay the light mastery of the Arab rider; that is what a man sees, in the patchwork pavilion, when he grows used to the coloured canvas and looks at the walls of stone.  This also was far too great a thing for facile praise or blame, a vast bureaucracy busy and yet intensely dignified, the most civilised thing ruling many other civilisations.  It was an endless end of the world; for ever repeating its rich finality.  And I myself was still walking in that long evening of the earth; and Caesar my lord was at Byzantium.

But it is necessary to remember next that this empire was not always at its evening.  Byzantium was not always Byzantine.  Nor was the seat of that power always in the city of Constantine, which was primarily a mere outpost of the city of Caesar.  We must remember Rome as well as Byzantium; as indeed nobody would remember Byzantium if it were not for Rome.  The more I saw of a hundred little things the more my mind revolved round that original idea which may be called the Mediterranean; and the fact that it became two empires, but remained one civilisation, just as it has become two churches, but remained one religion.