So through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying: "O heart I made, a heart beats here!"
Thus dreaming, we journeyed on, still over vast spaces with dim horizons, bounded by low ranges of hills, showing in deep purple against the cloudless, sapphire sky.
Suddenly all was changed! We were no longer among the unsatisfied yearnings of pilgrimage but the companions of that youngest brother in the fairy tales, whose long journeyings had so often entered into our dream of the distant lands, for were we not drawing up at the gate of the Enchanted Palace, more beautiful than any dream, more deeply mysterious than the wonders of the Arabian Nights?
"Here all things in their place remain,
As all were ordered, ages since.
Come, Care and Pleasure, Hope and Pain,
And bring the fated fairy Prince!"
Truly the place was under a spell—here in this wide wilderness, an unfinished dream of the sculptor of a giant age, stood the Castle of Mshatta; far exceeding any description which we had read or heard; paralysing us with such awe of its beauty and mystery as seldom seizes one before the work of Man; its immensity, its majesty, the unique perfection of its workmanship, above all, its silence, its absolute mystery, seeming in unison with the vast works of Nature all around, rather than with any conception of a merely human mind.
We were speechless in presence of this monument of a race to which we could give no name, of a purpose at which we could not even guess, of aspirations never fulfilled, hopes never realised.