A fantastic growth, it seemed to me,
every time I looked at the New Delhi
of Sir Edwin Lutyens, a style without
ancestry, without posterity, an archi-
tectural sport; and I compared it, ac-
cording to my varying mood, now with
the Pyramids of Egypt, now with the
great statues of Easter Island, now
with the megaliths of Avebury or Stone-
henge. All the same, as my eye sought
to comprehend that great pink and white
symmetry of palaces and pagodas, foun-
tains and obelisks, ornamented ponds
and regal statues, I couldn't help
thinking of those Roman magnificos of
whom Gibbon wrote, who "were not a-
fraid to show that they had the spir-
it to conceive, and the wealth to ex-
ecute the most grandiose designs."
If there is anything that heartens me, on this recurrence of Valentine's Day, it is the promise of the eventual triumph of
a cultivated point of view over a disturbed frame of mind -
two familiar antagonists in the films of Alfred Hitchcock,
and even in the fantasias roiling the American government -
which we can find in the survivorship of Gibbon, to write
about Rome at her most hideous, and in the letters and diar-
ies of a 20th Century successor of his, still perhaps too
warmly controversial for his virtues to be obvious. They
are more valued with every passing day of trashings of our
point of view by a disturbed frame of mind; but most uncom-
monly beautiful, is his confiding of waging this very con-
flict before one's eyes, in a virile genius for language.
What heartens me is how he lifts himself, not by denial of
what he witnesses, but by refusing it; a benchmark mind,
I am also amazed, by the refreshment in his every return.
It isn't a mist, - for a mist is a delicious thing
that creeps down English valleys in the night-time,
leaving a cool trail of dew, - it's a stinking, pes-
tiferous miasma that hangs over the city of Basra;
and as I sat in its chromium-plated hotel, contem-
plating it, I recognised that whatever disgrunted
travellers have reported of it is true. Like Bah-
rain, .. it smells of singed wet flannel; and the
Euphrates seeps through it, generating dusty palm
trees and mosquitoes. Was it really here that our
civilization began? It seemed incredible; let us
rather give the priority to Egypt, I said to my-
self, and went in to dinner to escape these morbid
reflections. And at the same time they issued forth
from the bar, the European colonists of Basra,
mirthless men with paperish yellow faces. The damp
heat had ironed out their souls, and like the lotus-
eaters, having drunk the gin-and-bitters of Basra,
they wished only to live on there, among the mud-
houses, and the festering waterways, and the Shatt-
al-Arab Hotel, with its bed-bugs and its execrable
local gin.
And yet how trivial are these outward things! For
sitting on a stool at Basra, I learned from a casual
fellow-passenger that he had once, in the west coun-
try, bred a pack of basset hounds; and at once the
miasma parted, the heat and the smell vanished away,
the gin tasted exquisite, the paper-faced colonists
sparkled with wit and culture, and the glorious hea-
ven shown down on Basra, cradle of our civilization.
Hugh Trevor-Roper
The Wartime Journals
Richard Davenport-Hines
editor
Spring, 1944
Literary Estate of Lord Dacre
of Glanton©
I. B. Tauris, 2012
ii Margo Davis
Antigua ruins
ca 1970
iv Tassos Paschalis
Paros
ca 2010
