|The Aqueduct|
One conspicuous monument survives to emphasise the retreat of the empire. It is something the Arab could not waste because it did not lie within the circuit of the walls: its great stones were too remote from his buildings to be removed, and its mass too threatening to be undermined. It was the Aqueduct. This, for the most part, still stands, and carries an aspect of endurance which is the more awful in that nothing else of the city has endured. It spans a lonely valley in which the bay and the old harbour are forgotten, and it is as enormous as the name of Rome.
It is more like a wall for height and completeness than are any of the huge Roman arches I know. Its height is such that it catches the mind more strongly than does the Pont du Gard, and its completeness such that it arrests the eye more than do the long trails of arches that stretch like rays across the Campagna. It appalls one because it is quite alone, and because the multitude that gave it a meaning has disappeared. One could wish to have seen this thing before the French came, when the brushwood of the valley was quite deserted and when one might have thought it fixed for ever in an intangible isolation which no European would come again to reoccupy and to disturb.
Even to-day one may climb to the further, inland, side and look down the perspective of its arches with some illusion of loneliness, and live for an hour in the fifteen centuries of its abandonment. Its height, its fineness, and the ruin of its use are so best seen, and its long line of purpose, pointing on to a city that no longer remembers baths or fountains. It is the ceaseless refrain of Africa. Italy, Gaul, and Spain have ruins like these, but these ruins are right against a life which has always been vigorous and to-day is especially renewed: only in this one province of Africa do you find Rome arrested, as it were—its spirit caught away and its body turned into stone.
|The Beginning of the Journey to the Desert|
There was last to be seen, before I could leave this province, the desert and those dead towns which stand along the hither fringe of it: the deserted homes of the Romans, and chief among them Timgad.
The Atlas, I had heard, is there at its highest, and the knot of mountains into which it rises is called the Aurès. Upon its southern side it fell steeply (I was told) upon the Sahara, and its northern supported, on the last of the High Tableland, those ruined cities. Here the frontier legionaries had been posted, and here the Arab invasion had so wasted the forests and dried up the run of water that the towns had died at once. This Timgad in particular is famous for its perfection and for the complete survival of its form, but especially for this, that you walk along paved streets and between standing columns and look, from the seats of a theatre, towards a great arch or gate not yet fallen, and yet never hear the voice of a living man.