His soul too had been wounded by the darkness that surrounds the spirit and makes for isolation. There is a passage in _Esto Perpetua_ in which Belloc—once again “Myself”—met a stranger in Timgad, that African town, once Roman and fertile, now empty and given back to the desert. They spoke to one another, and their conversation was the drama of salvation and damnation. Belloc looked on the desert, and he was tempted: the soul seemed nothing, and he thought of those who “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.”[36] He felt terror and was less a man. But he turned and went back to the place he had known, and the terror left him, and he was a man once again. Chapter Two GRIZZLEBEARD: HISTORY FROM WITHIN Among all the disciplines in which Hilaire Belloc has laboured, history stands out as his most ambitious field of endeavour. Belloc’s historical _practice_ is too complex to be judged in any general essay concerning his essential importance. But his historical _theory_ is crucially important for fixing the limits of his integrated Christian humanism. It is as an extension of his humanism that his historical position will be analyzed. The cardinal significance of the Bellocian conception of history is its traditionalism. History is organic; it grows from within a culture and is the actual cause of that culture’s corporate existence in present time. Since Christendom has been rendered one by a religious tradition that has permeated the diverse dimensions of the past—familial, regional, and the rest—the past is rendered intelligible by grasping the inner spirit that has seeded the ground and watered the growth of historical man. Those who attack Hilaire Belloc for being biased in his historical perspective must first settle the question of the very nature of history itself. For Belloc history begins as an extension of tradition; history is an act of “self-knowledge,” as he puts it in his magnificent introduction to _Europe and the Faith_. This act of self-knowledge does not proceed from any desire to systematize or catalogue facts. It does not proceed from the need man has for the possession of impersonal, objective truth. History is the effect of an inner command to know one’s soul. It is the completion of human consciousness. The passion for history is man’s Grizzlebeard. As the Sailor renders Myself unalienated from the physical universe in which he exists, the Grizzlebeard seals Myself in time which has stamped man in its own image. Belloc returns to this theme time and again in the essays, but nowhere does he express himself more movingly than in _The Old Road_, where he tells us why he elected to recover the Roman Way from Winchester to Canterbury.