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The bent heads; the long vistas of kneeling figures; the lovely contrasts of the flowing draperies; the trailing splendor of the priests' robes dying into the black note made by the nuns' sombre skirts; the gossamer brilliance of the hundreds of white veils, through which the young rapture of religious awe on lips and brow made even commonplace features beautiful; the choristers' scarlet petticoats; the culminating note of splendor, the Archbishop, throned like some antique scriptural king under the feathers and velvets of his crimson canopy; then the long lines of the townspeople with the groups of peasants beside them, whose well-sunned skins made even their complexion seem pale by the side of cheeks that brought the burn of noon-suns in the valleys to mind; and behind this wall of kneeling figures, those other walls, the long white-hung house facades, with their pendent sprigs and wreaths and garlands above which hung the frieze of human heads beneath the carved cornices; surely this was indeed the culminating moment, both in point of beauty and in impressiveness, of the great day's festival.
See, when you take up one, what a picture follows it: the plum that has swung at the top of a palm and crowded into itself the glow of those fierce noon-suns; it has been tossed by the sirocco, it has been steeped in reeking dew; there was always stretched above it the blue intense tent of a heaven full of light, always below and around, long level reaches of hot shining sand; the phantoms of waning desert moons have hovered over it, swarthy Arab chiefs have encamped under it; it has threaded the narrow streets of Damascus that city the most beautiful on the backs of gaunt gray dromedaries; it has crossed the seas, and all for you, if you take it, this product of desert freedom, torrid winds, and fervid suns!"
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