Hilaire Belloc
Where does this quote come from?
I know Hilaire Belloc wrote this, but what passage/essay/book does it come from?
“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him. In the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his reverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond. And on these faces, there is no smile.”
Belloc visited the ruins of Timgad, and as he sat in the solitude of the Sahara, watching the sand blow round the remnant marble pillars of the Greek city, he said: “We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him. In the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his reverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond. And on these faces, there is no smile.”
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