Classical expressed in architrave and column; it, too, was a defiance of architectural body, of “exterior.” But the very absence of an exterior emphasizes the more the unbroken coherence of the wall that shuts in the Cavern and allows no look and no hope to emerge from it. An ingeniously confusing interpenetration of spherical and polygonal forms; a load so placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weightless on high, yet closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines concealed; vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of the dome but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling-in—such are the characters that we see in the masterpieces of this art, S. Vitale in Ravenna, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock[237] in Jerusalem. Where the Egyptian puts reliefs that with their flat planes studiously avoid any foreshortening suggestive of lateral depth, where the Gothic architects put their pictures of glass to draw in the world of space without, the Magian clothes his walls with sparkling, predominantly golden, mosaics and arabesques and so drowns his cavern in that unreal, fairy-tale light which for Northerners is always so seductive in Moorish art. ----- Footnote 228: The same applies to the architecture of Thinite Egypt and to the Seleucid-Persian sun and fire temples of the pre-Christian area. Footnote 229: The combination of scrolls and “Greek keys” with the Dragon or other emblem of storm-power.—_Tr._ Footnote 230: Dvorák, _Idealismus und Naturalismus in der got. Skulptur u. Malerei_ (_Hist. Zeitschrift_, 1918, pp. 44 et seq.). Footnote 231: And, finally, ornament in the highest sense includes _script_, and with it, the Book, which is the true associate of the cult-building, and as an art-work always appears and disappears with it. (See Vol. II, pp. 182. et seq., pp. 298 et seq.) In writing, it is understanding as distinct from intuition that attains to form: it is not essences that those signs symbolize but notions abstracted therefrom by words, and as for the speech-habituated human intellect rigid space is the presented objective, the writing of a Culture is (after its stone- building) the purest of all expressions of its prime-symbol. It is quite impossible to understand the history of Arabesque if we leave the innumerable Arabian scripts out of consideration, and it is no less impossible to separate Egyptian and Chinese style-history from the history of the corresponding writing-signs and their arrangement and application. Footnote 232: See p. 173. Footnote 233: