The Nomadic Alternative – Page 61

When the sun set a flintilla of silver candelabra illumined the darkened vault as stars glitter in the night sky. The soft beams of their light flowed from the windows, and the building transformed itself into a beacon guiding the sea-worn sailor back to port. The Celestial Lighthouse also lit the Way to the Living God.

The four entrances of the church symbolized the Four Gates of Paradise, and if the hovering vault was Heaven, the walls, arches and pillars were Earth - the Earth of the Emperor of the Romans and field of his territorial ambitions. The variety, the splendour and the geographic distribution of the mineral wealth grafted onto the structure reflected the extent of those ambitions. The Emperor did not like wood; Wood decayed and decay was unthinkable. The Temple of Solomon had been but the ephemeral creation of combustible cedar. But this temple was of stone - the immutable.

Paul the Silentary catalogued the marbles in his poem - the fresh green of Carystos, the many-coloured Phrygian, purple porphyry "powdered with white stars", emerald-coloured from the hills behind Sparta, marble from the Iasian hills "blood streaked with white", the Lydian "crocus-coloured glittering with gold", the onyx of the Atrax Plain "in some parts green as the sea or an emerald, in others like cornflowers with drifts of white snow", the Thessalian "deep blue peace of summer seas broken by the plashing oar of a ship", and finally the product of far-flung Celtic crags, granite from the Pyrenees with crystal white veins "like milk poured over black flesh."

Mineral wealth, torn from the body of the earth which opens its veins to the prospector, reinforces the life-preserving illusion of progress. The harder or less destructible the mineral, the more durable the illusion. Purple Imperial porphyry is the hardest and perhaps the most beautiful marble in the world, and at the time of Justinian it was mined from one quarry in the eastern Desert of Egypt. Unpolished columns still lie abandoned in parched wadis lined with camel thorn, where the slave gangs who were hauling them to the Red Sea or Nile, either broke their [illegible] or died of [illegible].