He was a good host, and did not answer. He went out, and came back with cheese. Then he said, as he put it down before me:
“I do assure you it is sheep,” and we discussed the point no more.
|Timgad|
But in the hour that followed we spoke of many things—of the army (which he remembered), of active service (which he regretted, for he had lost half a hand), of money (which he loved), and of the Church—which he hated. He was good to the bottom of his soul. His face was sad. He had most evidently helped the poor, he had fought hard and gained his independence, and there he was under Aurès, in a neglected place a thousand miles away from his own people, talking French talk of disestablishment and of the equality of all opinion before the law. So we talked till the camel (or sheep) was stiff in its plate and cold, and the first glimmer of dawn had begun to sadden the bare room and to oppress the yellow light of the candle. Then he took me to a room, and as I went I saw from a window, beyond a garden he had planted, the awful sight of Timgad, utterly silent and ruined, stretching a mile under the dull morning; and with that sight still controlling me I fell heavily asleep.
When the morning came I looked out again from my window and I saw the last of the storm still hurrying overhead, and beneath and before me, of one even grey colour and quite silent, the city of Timgad. There was no one in it alive. There were no roofs and no criers. It was all ruins standing up everywhere: broken walls and broken columns absolutely still, except in one place where some pious care had led the water back to its old channels. There a little fountain ran from an urn that a Cupid held.
I passed at once through the gates and walked for perhaps an hour, noting curiously a hundred things: the shop-stalls and the lines of pedestals; the flag-stones of the Forum and the courses of brick—even, small, Roman and abandoned. I walked so, gazing sometimes beyond the distant limits of the city to the distant slopes of Atlas, till I came to a high place where the Theatre had once stood, dug out of a hillside and built in with rows of stone seats. Here I sat down to draw the stretch of silence before me, and then I recognised for the first time that I was very tired.
I said to myself: “This comes of my long march through the night”; but when I had finished my drawing and had got up to walk again (for one might walk in Timgad for many days, or for a lifetime if one chose) I found a better reason for my fatigue, which was this: that, try as I would I could not walk firmly and strongly upon those deserted streets or across the flags of that Forum, but I was compelled by something in the town to tread uncertainly and gently. When I recollected myself I would force my feet to a natural and ready step; but in a moment, as my thoughts were taken by some new aspect of the place, I found myself walking again with strain and care, noiselessly, as one does in shrines, or in the room of a sleeper or of the dead. It was not I that did it, but the town.
I saw, some hundred yards away, a man going to his field along a street of Timgad: he showed plainly for the houses had sunk to rubble upon either side of his way. This was the first life I had seen under that stormy mountain morning, and in that lonely place which had been lonely for so very long. He also walked doubtfully and with careful feet; he looked downward and made no sound.
I went up and down Timgad all that morning. The sun was not high before I felt that by long wandering between the columns and peering round many corners and finding nothing, one at last became free of the city. An ease and a familiarity, a sort of friendship with abandoned but once human walls, took the traveller as he grew used to the silence; but whether in such companionship he did not suffer some evil influence, I cannot say.