The Arabs borrowed largely from those they conquered, often utilising their talent and even their muscles in order to build palaces and mosques; but Arabic dreams were thus always realised. The exceptional originality of the Arab style resided in the fact that it was always imperiously guided by an art that was born at the same time as Islam. This art had no predecessors and offers us, as it were, the materialness of the Arabs' ideal. It is the art of calligraphic decoration, applied to the glorification of the word of Allah, otherwise the verses of the Qur'an. Even reduced to its own resources, this art of Arabic calligraphy is one of the most marvellous forms of decorative skill that has ever sprung from human imagination. It is perhaps the only science of ornament of which it may be said without exaggeration that it possesses a soul, for like the voice, it expresses thought. Owing nothing even to the most cultured parts of the outer world, its independence resembles that of music and seems like the stenography of the innermost beatings of the heart. Look at the letters which spring swiftly and horizontally from right to left as if acting under the impulse of inward life. Then they whirl on their own axis in discreet or impassioned curves, and are next erect, coming to a sudden halt, fixed in perpendicular pride.... They soon start off again in their frenzied gallop, unrolling their flourishes, bestriding each other in delicious fantasy and causing the imagination to soar in wild dreams. To follow the impulses of the reed-pen having traced these letters; and in order to enjoy the pure eminence of their form or the intense emotion of their curve, one need not be a past master of Arabic, or a subtile graphologist; any artistic mind can penetrate without any effort the secrets of their soul. After having expressed the ideal of his nation with such perfection, the Arab calligrapher bent beneath his yoke--almost religious--everything that was destined to support or enframe it: architecture and other systems of embellishment, forcing them to yield to the sway of his shaping skill. Under this yoke, the heavy, hemispherical dome of Byzantium was improved by adopting the pure outline of the Saracen helmet. The curves of the commonplace arcade became those of the graceful ogive, or of the proud, far-extending arch. The vulgar towers were metamorphosed into elegant minarets, leaping towards the peaks of ecstasy. [Illustration: _Theological Students, in the Courtyard of Al-Azhar, the great Cairo Moslem University._]