It is indeed the peculiar mark of Barbary, which makes it a scene of travel different from all others, that everywhere the huge monuments of Rome stand out in complete desertion. If civilisation had been continuous here as it has been in nearly every city of Europe, Africa would not move one in this fashion. Or if a race, active and laborious, had quarried these stones to build new towns, their aspect would be more familiar, because in Europe we are accustomed to such decay and it helps us to forget the vast foundation of Rome. But to find it here, sometimes in the desert, nearly always in a solitude; to round a sandy hill without trees or men and to come, beyond a dry watercourse, upon these enormous evidences of our forerunners and their energy, is an impression Europe cannot give.
|The Ampitheatre|
On the edge of the Sahara, in the very south of Tunis, where the salt of the waste is already upon one, there stands an arena of appalling size. It is smaller, but only a little smaller, than the Coliseum: it seems, in the silence and the glare, far larger. The Romans built it in their decline. You might as you watch it be in Rome or in Nîmes or in Arles, but you look around you and see the plain, and then the ruin grows fantastically broad and strong. Mountains are greatest when one wakes at morning and sees them unexpectedly after a long night journey; when the last sight one had by sunset was of low hills and meadows. So it is with these ruins in Africa. The silence and the loneliness frame them. They are sudden, and when they have once been seen, especially by a man who wanders in that country on foot and does not know what marvel he may not find at the next turn of the path, they never afterwards leave the mind.
|The Roman Planting of Trees and Towns|
The things Rome did in Barbary were these: Of agriculture, which had been exceptional, despised by the cavalry of the mountains and confined to the little plains at the heads of the harbour-bays, she made a noble and, while she ruled, a permanent thing. Indeed it is one of the tests of the return of Europe to her own in the Maghreb that with the advance of our race, corn and vineyards advance, and with our retreat they recede. Rome planted trees which brought and stored rain. She most elaborately canalised and used the insufficient water of the high plateaux. She established a system of great roads. Where Carthage had produced the congestion of a few commercial centres, Rome spread out everywhere small flourishing and happy towns; a whole string of them along the coast in every bay from the Hippos to Tangier. There is, perhaps, not one of the little harbours backed up against the spurs of the Atlas, each in its bay, that has not a Roman market-place beneath its own. Here, as throughout the west, the civilisation of Rome was easy and desired, for it was in her temper to be of a conquering simplicity and in her chronicles she openly confessed her sins. The same unity which moulded Gaul was felt in Africa. The Roman arch and brick and column, the Roman road—all of one certain type—are as plain throughout the Maghreb as a thousand miles away in Treves or Rheims.
|The Legionaries|
The desert was alien to Rome, as the sea was. The old trade from the Soudan which had been the staple of Leptis and which Carthage had certainly maintained, drooped and perhaps disappeared. Roman Africa turned to the Mediterranean and lived upon the commerce of its further shores. Along the edge of the Sahara a string of posts was held. Biskra was Roman, and El Kantara, and Gafsa. The doubt indeed is rather where the Romans did not penetrate, so tenacious were they in holding the southern boundary of Europe, the wall of the Atlas, against the wandering tribes of the sand. There is a fine story of a French commander who, having taken his column with great efforts through a defile where certainly men had never marched before, was proud, and sent a party to chisel the number of the regiment upon a smooth slab of rock above them, but when the men had reached it they saw in deep clear letters, cut long before, “The IIIrd Legion. The August. The Victorious.”
|Verecunda|
Of twenty startling resurrections of Rome which a man sees in less than twenty days on foot in any part of Algiers, consider this. Beyond Lamboesis, the frontier town of the Legionaries, with only a range of hills between it and the Sahara, there was a little town or village. It was quite small and a long way off from the city. It was of no importance; we have no record of it. Except that its name was Verecunda, we know nothing about it. One of its citizens, being grateful that he was born in his native place, thought he would give the little town or village a gate worthy of the love he bore it, and he built an arch all inspired with the weightiness of Rome.
The little town has gone. There is not a single stone of it left. But as you come round a grove of trees in a lonely part, under the height of Aurès, you have before you this great thing, as though it were on the Campagna or carefully railed round in some very wealthy city.