It is perhaps at Bone, which stands to half a mile where Hippo stood, that the best introduction to Africa is offered. Here a mountain of conspicuous height rules an open roadstead full of shipping small and large, and fenced round with houses for very many miles. A far promontory on the eastern side faces the western mountain, and half protects the harbour from summer gales. Below the mountain, the plain belonging to this bay stretches in a large half-circle, marked only here and there with buildings but planted everywhere with olives, vines and corn. In the midst of this great flat stands up a little isolated hill, a sort of acropolis, and from its summit, from a window of his monastery there, St. Augustine, looking at that sea, wrote Ubi magnitudo, ibi veritas.
|Hippo|
The town is utterly gone. There are those who argue that this or that was not done as history relates, because of this or that no vestige remains; and if tradition tells them that Rome built here or there, they deny it, because they cannot find walls, however much they dig (within the funds their patrons allow them). These men are common in the universities of Europe. They are paid to be common. They should see Hippo.
Here was a great town of the Empire. It detained the host of Vandals, slaves and nomads for a year. It was the seat of the most famous bishopric of its day, and within its walls, while the siege still endured, St. Augustine died. It counted more than Palermo or Genoa: almost as much as Narbonne. It has completely disappeared. There are not a few bricks scattered, nor a line of Roman tiles built into a wall. There is nothing. A farmer in his ploughing once disturbed a few fragments of mosaic, but that is all: they can make a better show at Bignor in the Sussex weald, where an unlucky company officer shivered out his time of service with perhaps a hundred men.
|Calama|
In the heart of the Tell, behind the mountains which hide the sea, yet right in the storms of the sea, in its clouds and weather, stands a little town which was called Calama in the Roman time and is now, since the Arabs, called Guelma.
It is the centre of that belt of hills. A broad valley, one of the hundreds which build up the complicated pattern of the Mediterranean slope, lies before the platform upon which the fortress rose. A muddy river nourishes it, and all the plain is covered with the new farms and vineyards—beyond them the summits and the shoulders that make a tumbled landscape everywhere along the northern shores of Africa guard the place whichever way one turns. From the end of every street one sees a mountain.
If a man had but one day in which to judge the nature of the province, he could not do better than come to this town upon some winter evening when it was already dark, and wake next morning to see the hurrying sky and large grey hills lifting up into that sky all around and catching the riot of its clouds. It is high and cold: there is a spread of pasture in its fields and a sense of Europe in the air. No device in the architecture indicates an excessive heat in summer and even the trees are those of Italy or of Provence. Its site is a survival from the good time when the Empire packed this soil with the cities of which so great a number have disappeared: it is also a promise of what the near future may produce, a new harvest of settled and wealthy walls, for it is in the refounding of such municipalities that the tradition of Europe will work upon Africa and not in barren adventure southward towards a sky which is unendurable to our race and under which we can never build and can hardly govern.
