Commonplace Book

'...Was it too extravagant to wonder whether these rubiginous and crumbling walls - on which the cactus's pale jade spikes and angles, the light showing flatly through them, stood set for protection like the equivalent dazzling panes of glass on an English wall - these robust but ancient towers, these turbanned arches, and still more the golden soil itself, the stones, over which the lizards darted like green flames, did not perhaps resent the imposition of a heavy and alien hand; whether the place was not, even now, African and infidel at heart; and if an inborn and clandestine hatred did not still run - just as the old religion, it was said, had persisted, hidden away under the new for several centuries - beneath the astonishing beauty of this surface?'

from The Man Who Lost Himself by Osbert Sitwell