The winds have scattered the personages of Europe, Asia, Africa, amid whom I appeared and of whom I have told you: one fell from the Acropolis at Athens, another from the shore of Chios, another flung himself from Mount Sion, yet another will never emerge from the waves of the Nile or the tanks of Carthage. The places themselves have changed: in the same way, as in America, cities have sprung up where I saw forests, an empire is being formed on those sands of Egypt where my eyes encountered only "horizons bare and rounded like the boss of a shield," as the Arab poems say, "and wolves so thin that their jaws are like a cleft stick." Greece has recovered the liberty which I wished her when travelling across her under the guard of a janissary. But does she enjoy her national liberty, or has she merely changed her yoke? [Sidenote: The future of the East.] In some measure I am the last visitor of the Turkish Empire under its old customs. The revolutions which have everywhere immediately preceded, or followed upon, my footsteps have spread over Greece, Syria, Egypt. Is a new East about to be formed? What will it bring forth? Shall we receive our just punishment for having taught the modern art of warfare to nations whose social state is based upon slavery and polygamy? Have we carried civilization beyond our boundaries, or have we brought barbarism within the circle of Christianity? What will result from the new interests, the new political relations, the creation of the Powers which may spring up in the Levant? No one can tell. I do not allow myself to be dazzled by steam-boats and railways, by the sale of the produce of manufactures, and by the fortunes of a few French, English, German, Italian soldiers enrolled in a pasha's service: all that is not civilization. Perhaps we shall behold the return, through the aid of the disciplined troops of future Ibrahims, of the perils which threatened Europe at the time of Charles the Hammer[725], and from which we were saved by the generous Poland. I pity the travellers who shall succeed me: the harem will no longer hide its secrets from them; they will not have seen the old sun of the East and the turban of Mahomet. The little Bedouin called out to me in French, when I passed into the mountains of Judæa: "Forward, march!" The order was given, and the East marched. * [Sidenote: _MEMENTO MORI._]