"For if there is one thing more than another which one gets from this old land, it is the conviction that it will not cease to be old because a few zealots march round it blowing the trumpets of a new and incomprehensible thing called Liberty. It is an amiable but disastrous illusion on the part of the western nations that they have created a monopoly in freedom and truth and the right conduct of life. As I have adumbrated to you more than once, I am not so sure of all this. The hoarse, guttural voice of Grünbaum, whom the high priests of Liberty set against a wall the other day and shot dead, comes back to me across the years. 'An illusion, founded on a misconception.' Well, I wouldn't call that an entirely true definition of democracy as we in the west understand it. But if you took this late resident of Hoboken, now safely restored to his traditional environment, I should certainly say that your wonderful democracy was of no more use to him than some fabulously expensive and delicate scientific instrument, or the Bodleian Library at Oxford, or the Elgin marbles would be. The trouble is, you see, that so many of us in the world, inarticulate for the most part, don't want your progress, your tremendous journeys through the air, your new religions, or your improved breakfast foods. And we could endure even such a war as is going on now, if we only had peace in our hearts. For peace is not a merely negative thing, the absence of strife. It is something in itself, something you could definitely discern in the atmosphere of that forgotten village of the plain, under that patriarchal tree, audible in the clucking of the fowls under one's feet, and in the gurgle of the water the girls hauled up from the dank darkness of the old well. I recall one moment, after our meal in the late afternoon, as we sat on the little balcony above the café, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and mastic. A drowsy stillness had come over the place, as though it had been secretly enchanted. Over the way an old gentleman reposed in a chair outside his shop, asleep, a yellow cat in his arms. On the curb of the well a young girl sat swinging one leg as she peered down thoughtfully into the water. A pigeon cooed in the cot under the eaves near by. There was a low murmur of conversation from a neighbouring room where Pollyni was talking to her aunt, a large shy person, preoccupied with household cares. And gradually I seemed to lose my grip of reality altogether and passed into a kind of passionless ecstasy of existence, where everything which puzzles us in ordinary life presented a perfectly simple and amiable solution. One of the commonplaces of enchantment, I suppose. I became aware of Artemisia saying dreamily: 'That was a loud one. I shouldn't have thought we could hear them over here.' And I nodded, remembering a distant and heavy detonation. It was slowly dawning on my mind as I sat and smoked and murmured, that it was really