The Palace Crumbled, Yet the Eyes Never Closed

Fragments of Umayyad painting from Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, southwest of Palmyra and now kept in the National Museum of Damascus, are read here by an architect who knows how walls are built and asks how what they carry survives. The plaster shattered and the faces became fragments, yet the eyes stayed open, and after French excavations uncovered them the pieces were gathered, documented and mounted on panels. The narrator stops before a woman with a white head covering folded through with red, wide eyes outlined in black and pendant pearls, raising a fan in a small movement that outlived the air of her room, and before a man in a domed helmet whose hand moves toward his chin like a soldier in thought. He sees eastern Hellenistic and Sasanian traditions meeting on these walls, and before strangely formed faces whose subject remains open he refuses to invent a story, since respecting an artifact includes respecting what we do not know about it. The book ends with preservation as work for the future, a wall that can carry a meeting between ages, and eyes that stay open because the encounter begins again whenever someone stands before them.