“Did you ever see anything that so adequately embodied the Arab conception of pleasure? Coolness, moisture, the singing of water, noble proportions, and clean colour wrought into grave and continent devices? Was there ever anything,” she went on, “so curious as the contradictions of racial instincts? Who could suppose that this would be the home-ideal of those wild desert dwellers who always loved and fought like demons; who were the most voluptuous, the most cruel, the most poetic and the ‘so fightingest’ race the world has probably ever seen!” “Oh, contradictions!” laughed Jane. “Here’s a flat contradiction, if you like. Please contemplate the delicious, the exquisite absurdities of these frescoes.” For, needless to say, the Eighteenth Century had not allowed to escape so exquisite an opportunity to make an ass of itself, and had spread over the clean, composed patterns of the tiled walls a layer of lime-wash 241on which it had proceeded to paint in coarse, bright colours indecently unclad goddesses, all flushed blowzy and beribboned; all lolloping amourously about on clouds or in chariots, or falling into the arms of be-wigged deities of war or of love. Fortunately the greater part of these gross conceptions had been diligently scrubbed away, but enough remained to make Peripatetica splutter indignantly: “Well, of all the hideous barbarians! The Eighteenth Century was really the darkest of dark ages.” “My dear,” Jane explained contemptuously, “the Eighteenth Century wasn’t a period of time. It was merely a deplorable state of mind. And the mind seems to have been slightly tipsy, it was so fantastic and ridiculous, and yet so gravely self-satisfied.” La Cuba, another Saracenic relic, was so obliterated into the mere military barrack to which it had been transformed that there was nothing for it but to pass on to the Normans, and to great Roger de Hauteville, a fit companion of the Paladins, so heavy a “Hammer of the Moors” was he—so knightly, so romantic, so beautiful. Not until twelve years after that bold attempt at Messina to conquer a kingdom with only sixty companions was Roger able to enter Palermo, and he and his nephews chose for themselves “delectable gardens abounding with fruit and water, and the knights were royally lodged in an earthly paradise.”