Esto perpetua

by Hilaire Belloc

I came to one place and to another and to another, each quite without men, and each casting such an increasing spell upon the mind as is cast by voices heard in the night, when one does not know whether they are of the world, or not of the world.

I came to a triumphal arch which had once guarded the main entry to the city from Lamboesis and the west. It was ornate, four-sided, built, one would think, in the centuries of the decline. Beyond it, the suburbs into which the city expanded just before it fell stretched far out into the plain. Not far from it a very careful inscription recalled a man who has thus survived as he wished to survive; the sacred tablet testified to the spirit which unites the religion of antiquity with our own—for it was chiselled in fulfilment of a vow. In another place was the statue of the gods’ mother, crowned with a wall and towers. This also was of the decline, but still full of that serenity which faces wore before the Barbarian march and the sack of cities.

There is a crossing of the streets in Timgad where one may sit a long time and consider her desolation upon every side. The seclusion is absolute, and the presence of so many made things with none to use them gradually invades the mind. The sun gives life to you as you look down this Decumanian way, and see the runnels where the wheels ran once noisily to the market; it warms you but it nourishes for you no companions. The town stares at you and is blind.

Against the sky, upon a little mound, stand two tall columns, much taller than the rest. They shine under the low winter sun from every part of Timgad and are white over the plain of grey stones. They may have been raised for the Temple of Capitoline Jove.

These will detain the traveller for as long as he may choose to regard them, so violently do they impress him with the negation of time. It is said that in certain abnormal moods things infinitely great and infinitely little are present together in the mind: that vast spaces of the imagination and minute contacts of the finger-tips are each figured in the brain, the one not driving out the other. In such moods (it is said) proportion and reality grow faint, and the unity and poise of our limited human powers are in peril. Into such a mood is a man thrown by Timgad, and especially by these two pillars of white stone. They proceed so plainly from the high conceptions of man: so much were their sculptors what we are in every western character: so fully do they satisfy us: so recent and clean is the mark of the tool upon them that they fill a man with society and leave him ready to meet at once a living city full of his fellows. It only needs a spoken word or the clack of a sandal to be back into the moment when all these things were alive. And meanwhile, with that impression overpowering one’s sense, there, physically present, is a desolation so complete that measure fails it. No oxen moving: no smoke: no roof among the rare trees of the horizon: no gleam of water and no sound. It is as though not certain centuries but an incalculable space of days coexisted with the present, and as though, for one eternal moment, a vision of the absolute in which time is not were permitted—for no good—to the yet embodied soul.

|The Stranger|

I do not know what was the hour in which I turned and left this sight, and leaving by the southern gate made for the mountain range of Aurès. But it was yet early afternoon, and the track had risen but little into the hills when I saw, some little way off, seated upon a great squared stone which had lain there since the departure of our people, a man of a kind I had not met in Africa before.

By his dress he was rather a colonist than a native, for he wore no turban—indeed his head was bare; but his long cloak was cut in an unusual shape, covering him almost entirely; it was dark and made of some stuff that had certainly not been woven in a modern loom. He saluted me as I came.