The Count, pursuing some other line of thought, broke out into a kind of Delphic rhapsody: 

“Folly of men!  The wits of our people have been blunted, their habits bestialized, their very climate and landscape ruined.  The alert genius of the Greeks is clogged by a barbaric, leaden-hued religion—­the fertile plains of Asia Minor and Spain converted into deserts!  We begin, at last, to apprehend the mischief; we know who is to blame; we are turning the corner.  Enclosed within the soft imagination of the homo MEDITERRANEUS lies a kernel of hard reason.  We have reached that kernel.  The Northerner’s hardness is on the surface; his core, his inner being, is apt to quaver in a state of fluid irresponsibility.  Yet there must be reasonable men everywhere; men who refuse to wear away their faculties in a degrading effort to plunder one another, men who are tired of hustle and strife.  What, sir, would you call the phenomenon of to-day?  What is the outstanding feature of modern life?  The bankruptcy, the proven fatuity, of everything that is bound up under the name of Western civilization.  Men are perceiving, I think, the baseness of mercantile and military ideals, the loftiness of those older ones.  They will band together, the elect of every nation, in god-favoured regions round the Inland Sea, thee to lead serener lives.  To those how have hitherto preached indecorous maxims of conduct they will say:  ’What is all this ferocious nonsense about strenuousness?  An unbecoming fluster.  And who are you, to dictate how we shall order our day?  Go!  Shiver and struggle in your hyperborean dens.  Trample about those misty rain-sodden fields, and hack each other’s eyes out with antideluvian bayonets.  Or career up and down the ocean, in your absurd ships, to pick the pockets of men better than yourselves.  That is you mode of self-expression.  It is not ours.’  And Mediterranean people will lead the way.  They have suffered more than all from the imbecilities of kinds and priests and soldiers and politicians.  They now make an end of this neurasthenic gadding and getting.  They focus themselves anew and regain their lost dignity.  That ancient individualistic tone reasserts itself.  Man becomes a personality once more—­”

He continued for some time in this prophetic strain, the bishop listening with considerable approbation though, at a certain point of the discourse, he would have liked to drop a word about Thermopylae and Marathon.  He also knew something of the evils of Northern industrialism—­how it stunts the body and warps the mind.

“What a charming dreamer!” he thought.

It was rather convenient for the Count to be able to pass, just then, for a dreamer.

As a matter of fact, he was an extremely practical old gentleman.

CHAPTER VIII

“Sanidin?” queried Denis almost flippantly, as he held up a fragment of rock.