Download the full version of the ebook now at ebookgrade.

com

Culture and Power The Sociology of Pierre

Bourdieu David Swartz

https://ebookgrade.com/product/culture-and-power-
the-sociology-of-pierre-bourdieu-david-swartz/

Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookgrade.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

Language and Symbolic Power by Pierre Bourdieu

https://ebookgrade.com/product/language-and-symbolic-power-by-pierre-
bourdieu/

ebookgrade.com

Pierre Bourdieu Key Concepts by Michael Grenfell

https://ebookgrade.com/product/pierre-bourdieu-key-concepts-by-
michael-grenfell/

ebookgrade.com

Pierre Bourdieu Key Concepts 2nd Edition Grenfell Michael

James;

https://ebookgrade.com/product/pierre-bourdieu-key-concepts-2nd-
edition-grenfell-michael-james/

ebookgrade.com

Power of Play The David Elkind

https://ebookgrade.com/product/power-of-play-the-david-elkind/

ebookgrade.com
International Logistics The Management of International
Trade Operations 5th Pierre David

https://ebookgrade.com/product/international-logistics-the-management-
of-international-trade-operations-5th-pierre-david/

ebookgrade.com

Culture of Pain The David B. Morris

https://ebookgrade.com/product/culture-of-pain-the-david-b-morris/

ebookgrade.com

Quirks of Digital Culture The David Beer

https://ebookgrade.com/product/quirks-of-digital-culture-the-david-
beer/

ebookgrade.com

Culture of Pain The David B. Morris

https://ebookgrade.com/product/culture-of-pain-the-david-b-morris-2/

ebookgrade.com
Other documents randomly have
different content
then let them explain the story of the goats, for I cannot. I will repeat
it to save them the trouble of turning back.
A young man of Ain-Yagout, hearing that the Government had
carefully planted little cedars on a distant hill, drove his goats fifteen
miles to browse upon the same. “Better,” said he, “that I should
flourish than the Government, and that my goats should give milk
than that these silly little trees should fatten.”
They caught him and brought him before the magistrate, where he
confessed what he had done, and even that he had lifted the goats
laboriously, one by one, over a high wall to get at the Government
trees. But when they asked him what good reason he could give for
his conduct, he replied:
“R’aho! It was the will of God. Mektoub, it was written.”
Or words to that effect.
I will admit that when the full lips, the long uncertain eye and the
tall forehead of the true Arab met me in these short travels I was
always half silenced and half moved to question and to learn. But I
saw such Oriental features rarely, for, in spite of the turban and the
bernous, they are very rare.
Indeed, of all the men I came across in this The Moor
country, only two were of the purely Oriental kind
the books make out to be so common. One was a fierce Moor of
gigantic stature and incredible girth. He was dressed in bright green,
and drank the cordial called crême de menthe in a little bower. The
other was a poor Arab and old, who sold fruits upon a stall in Setif. In
his face there was a deep contempt of Christendom.
The snow fell all around him swiftly, mixed The Little Old
with sleet and sharp needles of cold rain. It was Semite
evening and the people were passing down the street hurriedly to
find their homes: so passed I, when I saw him standing like a little
stunted ghost in the rain. He knew me at once for some one to whom
Africa was strange, and therefore might have hoped to make me
stop even upon such a night to buy of him. Yet he did not say a
word, but only looked at me as much as to say: “Fool! will you buy?”
And I looked back at him as I passed, and put my answer into my
eyes as much as to say: “No! Barbarian, I will not buy.” In this way
we met and parted, and we shall never see each other again till that
Great Day....

Remembering him and this last one who had given me a ride, I
went on through the night towards Timgad.
It was a very lonely road.
Loneliness, when it is absolute, is very difficult The Lonely Night
to depict, for it is a negation and lacks quality, March
and therefore words fail it. But one may express the loneliness of
that valley best by saying that it felt, not as though men had deserted
it, but as though men had perpetually tried to return to it and, as
perpetually, had despaired and left the sullen earth. The impression
was false. The Romans had once thoroughly possessed and tilled
this land: the scrub had once been forests, the shifting soil ordered
and bounded fields; but the Mohammedan sterility had sunk in so
deeply that one could not believe that our people had ever been
here. Even the sharp and recent memory of those ruins of
Lamboesis faded in the stillness. Europe came back into my mind.
The full rivers and the fields which are to us a natural landscape are
but a made garden and are due to continuous tradition, and I
wondered whether, if that tradition were finally lost, our sons would
come to see, in England as I saw here in the night in Africa, vague
hills without trees and drifts of mould and sand through which the
rain-bursts would dig deep channels at random.
There was a moon risen by this time, but it lay behind a level flow
of clouds. All along the way, to my right, made smaller by the
darkness, lay Aurès—one could still just discern the snow upon his
summits. The road went on—French, exact, and, if I may say so,
alien—bridging this barbaric void which already smelt of the desert
where it lay beyond those mountains down under the southern wall
of Atlas. For the desert, when I had seen Timgad, I determined to
strike.
So the road went on, and I with it till I came to The Columns of
the thirty-second stone, and recognised its Timgad
number by holding a match close by. Then I knew that I had covered
twenty miles and was close to Timgad. A branch road opened out on
the right, and there was a sign-post pointing along it. I followed the
new road across a careful girder bridge such as might cross a brook
in Normandy. I saw a light up on the rise of the foot-hills, and beyond
it, suddenly and yet dimly, a very mob of columns. They stood up
against the vague glimmer of the sky of every size and in thousands,
as though they were marching. A little rift in the clouds let in the
moon upon them palely. Her light was soon extinguished, but in that
moment I had seen a large city, unroofed and dead, in the middle of
this wasted land.
However men may act who see a vision but The Old Soldier
see it in extreme fatigue, so did I. I suffered the
violent impression of that ghost, but my curiosity was no longer of
the body. I took no step to see the wonder which this gleam had
hinted at, but I turned and struck at the door of the house which was
now quite near me, and which was still lit within. An old man, small,
bent, and full of energy, opened the door to me. He was that soldier
of whom they had told me at Lambèse.
“I was expecting you,” he said.
I remembered that the driver had promised to warn him, and I was
grateful.
“I have prepared you a meal,” he went on. Then, after a little
hesitation, “It is mutton: it is neither hot nor cold.”
 A man who has been on guard as often as had this old sergeant
need not mind awakening in the small hours, and a man who has
marched twenty miles and more in the dark must eat what he is
given, though it be sheep and tepid. So I sat down. He brought me
their very rough African wine and a loaf, and sat down opposite me,
looking at me fixedly under the candle. Then he said:
“To-morrow you will see Timgad, which is the most wonderful town
in the world.”
“Certainly not to-night,” I answered; to which he said, “No!”
I took a bite of the food, and he at once The Strange Food
continued rapidly: “Timgad is a marvel. We call it
‘the marvel.’ I had thought of calling this house ‘Timgad the Marvel,’
or, again, ‘Timgad the——’”
“Is this sheep?” I said.
“Certainly,” he answered. “What else could it be but sheep?”
“Good Lord!” I said, “it might be anything. There is no lack of
beasts on God’s earth.” I took another bite and found it horrible.
“I desire you to tell me frankly,” said I, “whether this is goat. There
are many Italians in Africa, and I shall not blame any man for giving
me goat’s flesh. The Hebrew prophets ate it and the Romans; only
tell me the truth, for goat is bad for me.”
He said it was not goat. Indeed, I believed him, for it was of a large
and terrible sort, as though it had roamed the hills and towered
above all goats and sheep. I thought of lions, but remembered that
their value would forbid their being killed for the table. I again
attempted the meal, and he again began:
“Timgad is a place——”
At this moment a god inspired me, and I shouted, “Camel!” He did
not turn a hair. I put down my knife and fork, and pushed the plate
away. I said:
“You are not to be blamed for giving me the food of the country,
but for passing it under another name.”
He was a good host, and did not answer. He went out, and came
back with cheese. Then he said, as he put it down before me:
“I do assure you it is sheep,” and we discussed the point no more.
But in the hour that followed we spoke of Timgad
many things—of the army (which he
remembered), of active service (which he regretted, for he had lost
half a hand), of money (which he loved), and of the Church—which
he hated. He was good to the bottom of his soul. His face was sad.
He had most evidently helped the poor, he had fought hard and
gained his independence, and there he was under Aurès, in a
neglected place a thousand miles away from his own people, talking
French talk of disestablishment and of the equality of all opinion
before the law. So we talked till the camel (or sheep) was stiff in its
plate and cold, and the first glimmer of dawn had begun to sadden
the bare room and to oppress the yellow light of the candle. Then he
took me to a room, and as I went I saw from a window, beyond a
garden he had planted, the awful sight of Timgad, utterly silent and
ruined, stretching a mile under the dull morning; and with that sight
still controlling me I fell heavily asleep.
When the morning came I looked out again from my window and I
saw the last of the storm still hurrying overhead, and beneath and
before me, of one even grey colour and quite silent, the city of
Timgad. There was no one in it alive. There were no roofs and no
criers. It was all ruins standing up everywhere: broken walls and
broken columns absolutely still, except in one place where some
pious care had led the water back to its old channels. There a little
fountain ran from an urn that a Cupid held.
 I passed at once through the gates and walked for perhaps an
hour, noting curiously a hundred things: the shop-stalls and the lines
of pedestals; the flag-stones of the Forum and the courses of brick—
even, small, Roman and abandoned. I walked so, gazing sometimes
beyond the distant limits of the city to the distant slopes of Atlas, till I
came to a high place where the Theatre had once stood, dug out of
a hillside and built in with rows of stone seats. Here I sat down to
draw the stretch of silence before me, and then I recognised for the
first time that I was very tired.
I said to myself: “This comes of my long march through the night”;
but when I had finished my drawing and had got up to walk again (for
one might walk in Timgad for many days, or for a lifetime if one
chose) I found a better reason for my fatigue, which was this: that,
try as I would I could not walk firmly and strongly upon those
deserted streets or across the flags of that Forum, but I was
compelled by something in the town to tread uncertainly and gently.
When I recollected myself I would force my feet to a natural and
ready step; but in a moment, as my thoughts were taken by some
new aspect of the place, I found myself walking again with strain and
care, noiselessly, as one does in shrines, or in the room of a sleeper
or of the dead. It was not I that did it, but the town.
I saw, some hundred yards away, a man going to his field along a
street of Timgad: he showed plainly for the houses had sunk to
rubble upon either side of his way. This was the first life I had seen
under that stormy mountain morning, and in that lonely place which
had been lonely for so very long. He also walked doubtfully and with
careful feet; he looked downward and made no sound.
I went up and down Timgad all that morning. The sun was not high
before I felt that by long wandering between the columns and
peering round many corners and finding nothing, one at last became
free of the city. An ease and a familiarity, a sort of friendship with
abandoned but once human walls, took the traveller as he grew used
to the silence; but whether in such companionship he did not suffer
some evil influence, I cannot say.
I came to one place and to another and to another, each quite
without men, and each casting such an increasing spell upon the
mind as is cast by voices heard in the night, when one does not
know whether they are of the world, or not of the world.
I came to a triumphal arch which had once guarded the main entry
to the city from Lamboesis and the west. It was ornate, four-sided,
built, one would think, in the centuries of the decline. Beyond it, the
suburbs into which the city expanded just before it fell stretched far
out into the plain. Not far from it a very careful inscription recalled a
man who has thus survived as he wished to survive; the sacred
tablet testified to the spirit which unites the religion of antiquity with
our own—for it was chiselled in fulfilment of a vow. In another place
was the statue of the gods’ mother, crowned with a wall and towers.
This also was of the decline, but still full of that serenity which faces
wore before the Barbarian march and the sack of cities.

There is a crossing of the streets in Timgad where one may sit a

long time and consider her desolation upon every side. The
seclusion is absolute, and the presence of so many made things with
none to use them gradually invades the mind. The sun gives life to
you as you look down this Decumanian way, and see the runnels
where the wheels ran once noisily to the market; it warms you but it
nourishes for you no companions. The town stares at you and is
blind.

Against the sky, upon a little mound, stand two tall columns, much
taller than the rest. They shine under the low winter sun from every
part of Timgad and are white over the plain of grey stones. They may
have been raised for the Temple of Capitoline Jove.
These will detain the traveller for as long as he may choose to
regard them, so violently do they impress him with the negation of
time. It is said that in certain abnormal moods things infinitely great
and infinitely little are present together in the mind: that vast spaces
of the imagination and minute contacts of the finger-tips are each
figured in the brain, the one not driving out the other. In such moods
(it is said) proportion and reality grow faint, and the unity and poise
of our limited human powers are in peril. Into such a mood is a man
thrown by Timgad, and especially by these two pillars of white stone.
They proceed so plainly from the high conceptions of man: so much
were their sculptors what we are in every western character: so fully
do they satisfy us: so recent and clean is the mark of the tool upon
them that they fill a man with society and leave him ready to meet at
once a living city full of his fellows. It only needs a spoken word or
the clack of a sandal to be back into the moment when all these
things were alive. And meanwhile, with that impression overpowering
one’s sense, there, physically present, is a desolation so complete
that measure fails it. No oxen moving: no smoke: no roof among the
rare trees of the horizon: no gleam of water and no sound. It is as
though not certain centuries but an incalculable space of days
coexisted with the present, and as though, for one eternal moment, a
vision of the absolute in which time is not were permitted—for no
good—to the yet embodied soul.
I do not know what was the hour in which I The Stranger
turned and left this sight, and leaving by the
southern gate made for the mountain range of Aurès. But it was yet
early afternoon, and the track had risen but little into the hills when I
saw, some little way off, seated upon a great squared stone which
had lain there since the departure of our people, a man of a kind I
had not met in Africa before.
By his dress he was rather a colonist than a native, for he wore no
turban—indeed his head was bare; but his long cloak was cut in an
unusual shape, covering him almost entirely; it was dark and made
of some stuff that had certainly not been woven in a modern loom.
He saluted me as I came.
When I approached him and saluted him in return, his face could
be seen inspired with a peculiar power, which, at a distance, his
attitude alone had discovered. It was not easy to be sure whether its
lines were drawn from Italy or from those rare exceptions wherein
the east seems sometimes to surpass our own race in force and
dignity. His forehead was low and very broad, his hair short, crisp,
strong, and of the colour of steel; his lips, which were thin and
controlled, had in their firm outline something of a high sadness, and
his whole features recalled those which tradition gives to the makers
and destroyers of religions. But it was his eyes that gave him so
singular and (as I can still believe though the adventure is now long
past) so magical an influence. These were in colour like the sea in
March, grey-green and full of light, or like some mountain stones
which when they are polished show the same translucent and
natural hue, shining from within with vivid changes; but, much more
than their luminous colour, their expression arrested me, for it had in
it an experience of immense horizons, and resembled that which
may sometimes be caught in the eyes of birds who have seen the
earth from the heights of the sky.
I first spoke and asked him whether I was well upon the path that
would lead me under Aurès, through the pass, to the sandstone hills
from whose summits one could see the desert for which I was
bound.
Whether Timgad had disturbed me, or his speech had in it that
something which at the time I feared, I cannot tell; but the very short
dialogue we had together influenced me in my loneliness for a whole
day, as a vivid dream will do. I will therefore write it down.
He rose and answered me that I was on a good path all the way,
and that there was plenty of lodging: that the road was safe, and that
my map would be an ample guide.
“From the other side of Aurès,” he said, “you will see one ridge of
red rocks beyond another. Even the furthest has some scrub upon it
upon this side, but from its summit you will see the desert, and on
this side it is easy to climb.”
Myself: “And how is the southern side towards the Sahara?”
He: “It is all precipice, but from the northern side you can cast
about and find a path which creeps down the end of the ridge to an
oasis of palm-trees. These are very numerous and evident from the
height. When you reach them you will find a large river flowing
towards the desert, a great road and a railway. It is easy to return.”
All this I knew already from my reading, and from my map, but I
listened to him for the sake of the tones of his voice: these had a sort
of laugh in them when he added that I should be glad to get back to
water, to trees and to men.
Myself: “But there is, as you say and know, no danger on this
road from the tribes or from beasts.”
He: “No. Very little.”
Myself: “What other danger can there be?”
 He answered that many who saw the desert learnt more than they
desired to learn.
I knew very well what he meant for I had heard many men
maintain that what was eternal must be changeless, and that what
was changeless must be dead. And I had noted how men who had
travelled widely were more simple in the Faith if they had chiefly
known the sea; but if they had chiefly known the desert, more subtle
and often emptied of the Faith at last: the Faith dried up out of them
as the dews are dried up out of the sand on the edges of the Sahara
in the brazen mornings. But these men, speaking in Christendom,
had affected me little; here, so near the waste places where men
cannot live, alone with such a companion, I felt afraid.
We walked along together slowly for a few paces; his sentences
were shorter than my replies, and were spoken low, and full of what
he and his call wisdom, but I, despair. We discussed together in
these brief moments the chief business of mankind. It was a power
much greater than his words that put my mind into a turmoil, though
his words were careful and heavy.... He told me that the day was
better than the night. The daylight was a curtain and a cheat, but
when it was gone you could see the dreadful hollow.
Myself: “In Sussex, which is my home, if a man were asked
which was the more beneficent, he would say ‘the night.’”
“In Sussex,” he answered gently (as though he knew the Downs)
“mists and kind airs continue the veil of the day.” He said that in the
desert the stars were terrible to man, and as he spoke of the endless
distances I remembered the old knowledge (but this time alive with
conviction) how great nations, as they advance with unbroken
records and heap up experience, and test life by their own past, and
grow to judge exactly the enlarging actions of men, see at last that
there is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves.
Their Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose
God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.
We had not talked thus for twenty minutes when we stopped at the
edge of a little wood, and, as his way was not mine, he made to
return. We both turned back to look at the plain below us, and the
salt dull valley and the dead town: the broken columns and the long
streets of Timgad, made small by the distance and all in one group
together. I looked at him as he stood there and the fantastic thought
half took me that he had known the city while it was yet loud with
men. When he had left me the oppression of his awful intensity and
of his fixed unnatural reason began to fade. I saw him go into a
secchia; I saw him again upon the further side swinging powerfully
down the slope. He crossed another fold of land, he showed upon
the crest beyond, and after that I did not see him again.
Then I turned and went up into Atlas, and as I The Walk to the
went I was in two minds, but at last tradition Desert
conquered and I was safe in my own steadfast instincts, settling
back as settles back with shorter and shorter oscillations some
balanced rock which violence has disturbed. The vast shoulder of
Aurès seemed worthy indeed of awe, but not of terror. I made a
companion of the snow, and I was glad to remember how many
living things moved under the forest trees.
So I continued for three days seeing many things, and drawing
them till I came to the south side where the streams go down to be
lost at last in the sand, and till I saw before me the sandstone ridge
red and bare, and from its summit looked out upon a changing
landscape, which dried and flattened and became the true desert
where miles and miles away a line quite hard and level marked the
extreme horizon. On this summit I lay in the shelter of a rock (for it
was bitterly cold and a violent wind blew off the snows of Aurès) and
looked a long time southward upon the country which is the prison-
wall of our race.
The man near Timgad had said truly that the The Sight of the
end of the Empire, the division and the Desert
boundary, was abrupt.
A precipice falls sharply right against the midday sun; it is built up
of those red rocks whose colour adds so much to the evil silence of
the Sahara, and the ridge-top of this precipice is here a sharp
dividing-line between living and desert land. Africa the province, the
Maghreb full of towns and men, ends in a coast, as it were, against
this blinding ocean of sand. You look down from its cliffs over a vast
space much more inhuman than the sea. Behind the traveller
stretches all the tableland he has traversed, bare indeed and strange
to a northerner, but very habitable and sown with large cities, living
and dead. There are behind him trees, many animals and rain: all
the diversity of a true climate and a long-cultivated soil. Before him
are sharp reefs of stone, unweathered, without moss, and with harsh
unrounded corners split by the furnace-days and the dreadful frosts
of the desert. The rocks emphasise the wild desert as reefs do the
wild of the sea: they rise out of sand that blows and shifts under the
wind.
On this day, as I took my first long look at the The View of the
Sahara, Aurès and the plateau beyond were all Desert
piled up with dark clouds, and one could see showers sweeping like
shadowy curtains over the distant forests to the northward; but
southward over the desert there was a sky like a cup of blue steel,
and a dazzling sunlight that made more desperate the desperate
iciness of the gale. When I could tolerate the cold no longer I began
to pick my way carefully downward.
I could not find any path such as the man at The Oasis
Timgad had told me of, and such as my map
showed, but what I had to do was clear, for down in the plain below
me a long line of palms marked an oasis and the passage of that
clear river which, as I knew, comes tumbling down from the Atlas to
be lost at last in the Sahara. No feature in the unusual view below
me was more characteristic than this: that green leaves were thus
bunched together, rare, isolated and exceptional, as with us are
waste rocks or heaths, while the wide sweep of the land, which with
us is all fields and trees and boundaries, here is abandoned
altogether. It was not the least part of my wonder in this new place to
find myself walking as I chose over an earth that was quite barren,
with no history, no obstacles, and no owner, towards a patch of
human land whose grove looked as an island looks from the sea. As
I neared those palms I found first the railway, and then the strong
high road which the astonishing French have driven right out here
into nothingness.
 I did not turn to enter the native village. I had The Arab Riding
no appetite to see more of the desert than I had
seen in my view from the hill. I had then seen a limit beyond which
men of my sort cannot go, and I was content to leave it to those
others who will remain for ever the enemies of our Europe. I saw one
on the road: a true Arab, what the French call “An Arab of the Great
Tent,” not what we and the Algerians are, but a rider of that race
which makes one family from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic. He
was on a horse going up before me into the hills, with the snow of
Aurès above him, and between us a tall palm. As I watched him and
admired his stately riding, I said to myself: “This is how it will end:
they shall leave us to our vineyards, our statues, and our harbour-
towns, and we will leave them to their desert here beyond the hills,
for it is their native place.... Then we shall have The Ksar
reached our goal, for we shall be back where the
Romans were, and the empire will be fully restored. For all things
return at last to their origins, and Europe must return to hers. They
must forget our cities which they ruined, and which we are so
painfully rebuilding, and we will not covet their little glaring ksours
which they build upon crags above the desert, and which are quite
white in the sun.... This is how it will end.”

When I came to that curious cleft or gorge through which the river,
the road and the railway all make their way together, one above the
other, from the plateau down into the desert plain, I saw a Christian
house after so many miles and days. I went in at once, drank wine,
and asked the hour of the train, for I was tired of this land. I was
hurrying to get back to reasonable shrines, and to smell the sea.
 “Very soon,” I said to myself, “I shall come The Return
back to the coast-harbours, and I shall see again
all the business of the shipping and the waves; and I shall see,
rounding the pier-heads, those happy boats which seem to be part of
the mist and of the very early morning.” So it was; for I came at the
close of a bright day through the hills of the Tell to the sea: here was
the Mediterranean, and here were all the sails. I saw again the little
harbour by which I had entered Africa, and I was glad to find such a
choice of ships at the quays, ready, as it seemed, to go to all parts of
the world. So I chose one that was a Spaniard, bound for Palma in
Majorca and I drove a bargain by which I was to go for next to
nothing, provided I stayed on deck, and ate none of their food.
 When I had driven this bargain, I bought wine, The Last Bargain
bread and meat ashore, and came back and
took a place right up in the bows from which to watch the sea. It was
the afternoon when we cast off and left the harbour, and before it
was quite dark we had lost the land. I lay there for many hours in the
bows, and thought about my home. And as I went across the sea I
recalled those roofs built for true winters, and those great fireplaces
of my own land. I also thought of the thick, damp woods which begin
by Tay and go on to Roncesvalles, but which north or south of these
are never seen; I remembered Europe well. There were women
there (to whom I was sailing) whose eyes were clear and simple, and
whose foreheads low; I remembered that all their gestures were
easy. I remembered that in the harbours men would meet me kindly;
I was to meet my own people again, and their ritual would not seem
to be ritual because it would be my own, and the air would be full of
bells. The ship also, going eagerly onwards dead north under the
stars; she carried me towards my native things, herself reaching her
own country, for nothing alien to Europe could make or preserve the
science that had constructed such engines and such a hull.
“In Europe, in the river-valleys,” I thought, “I The Memory of
will rest and look back, as upon an adventure, Europe And her
towards my journey in this African land. I shall Toast
be free of travel. I shall be back home. I shall come again to inns and
little towns. I shall see railways (of which I am very fond), and I shall
hear and see nothing that the Latin Order has not made.” I thought
about all these things as the ship drove on.
Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her
though she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had
made us all, how she was our mother and our author, and how in
that authority of hers and of her religion a man was free. On this
account, although I had no wine (for I had drunk it long before and
thrown the bottle overboard), I drank in my soul to her destiny. I had
just come back from the land which Europe had reconquered, and
which, please God, she shall continually hold, and I said to myself,
“Remain for ever.”
“We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you
remain for ever. What happens to this life of ours, which we had from
you, Salvâ Fide, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken
away. They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself
shall decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you are
preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of this
world.”
It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her
“Esto perpetua!” which means in her undying language: “You shall
not die”; and remembering this I have determined to give my
rambling book that title.

In a little while it began to be dawn; but as yet It Dawns

I saw no land. I saw before me a boundary of
waters tumbling all about, but I did not feel alone upon that sea. I felt
rather as a man feels on some lake inland, knowing well that there is
governed country upon every side.
This is the way in which a man leaves Africa and comes back to
the shore which Christendom has never lost.
But all the while as he goes from Africa northwards, steering for
the Balearics and the harbours of Spain, he remembers that other
iron boundary of the Sahara which shuts us in, and the barrier
against which his journey struck and turned. The silence permits him
to recall most vividly the last of the oases under Atlas upon the edge
of the wild.
There, where the fresh torrent that has The End
nourished the grove is already sinking, stagnant
and brackish, to its end, a little palm-tree lives all alone and
cherishes its life. Beyond it there is nothing whatsoever but the line
of the sand.
 FINIS

Printed by Ballantyne & Co., Limited

Tavistock Street, London

Transcriber’s Notes
1. Standardized hyphenated words when the same word appeared
in the text as both hyphenated and non-hyphenated.

2. Silently corrected palpable typographical errors; retained non-

standard spellings and dialect.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESTO
PERPETUA ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

will be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright
in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and without
paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General
Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if
you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the
trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the
Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such
as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and
printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in
the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright
law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially
commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE