III
Ranging through the country by rail, I found one of the oldest lands of earth wearing the signs, familiar to my eyes years ago, of the American West. It seemed, at times, like an hallucination of memory with odd differences, such as one might have in a dream. Now and then one came to a larger and well-gardened station, some watering-place of the richer citizens in summer; or to a thriving seaport; but, in general, the stops were at way stations, as in all thinly populated districts—a simple crossing of the long gray roads, with a few buildings for the business of the line, vast spaces round about, possibly slightly improved, with fields or orchards or little groves, a crowd of loafers hanging on the gates or fence of the enclosure to whom the arrival of the train was the day’s event, a farm wagon of modern make, with horses, awaiting some expected passenger and driving off to some home lost in the expanse; in a word, the impression was of colonial things, of the opening up of a country, of reclaiming the soil. What one really saw everywhere was a frontier.
In the newspapers there was the same absorbing theme—colonization; the local news, the daily happenings were characteristic of an agricultural, industrial, commercial life of the nature of an invasion of the waste. Here large depots for machinery were rising; there men of broad enterprise, or syndicate companies had planted olives, or corn, or vines, on a vast scale over miles of territory; further on, a new line was making accessible the phosphate wealth of Gafsa. Modern civilization, mechanism, communication, organized exploitation, penetrating a new country, was what one felt, as if that region were truly new like a savage land. Yet how many times civilization, in one or another form, has rolled over it! In reality, it is one of the most ancient beds of the human torrent, bare and forsaken as it looks now. And now it is again a new frontier—the place of the invasion of a new era by a new race with new designs.
This impression, nevertheless, is mainly a thing of the mind, of recollection and observation; to the eye it is not so noticeable, such is the extent of the natural spaces, the contour and atmosphere of things held in these far horizons, the new temperament of that landscape, and so characteristically native still is the aspect of indigenous human life not yet displaced. The earth has the look of the wild. Whatever may have formerly been its culture and occupancy, all had lapsed back to the primitive; a land of plains—melancholy tracts under a gray sky or vast empty spaces under a brilliant sun—edged in far distance by lone mountains, caressed on broken shores by a barren sea; full of solitude, sadness. Here and there some great ruin stood, not unlike Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, or even cities of ruins; the land is strewn with them—temples, courts, baths, cisterns, floors, columns, reliefs, arches of triumph, theatres; but they seldom count to the eye. Antiquity, like the frontier, is also a thing of the mind, in the main; the past and the future are both matter of reflection, in the background of memory and knowledge it may be, but not noticeable in the general landscape. It is a place where human fate seems transitory, an insignificant detail, as on the sea—or like animal life in nature, indifferent.