It is the most complete contrast, the most sudden and memorable revelation which modern travel affords. And if I had to advise any one who with short leisure desired some experience of modern travel, at least in the way of landscape, I would advise him to visit this astounding place. It has already found its way into many English books, but the great mass of people who could enjoy it do not yet know how exceedingly easy is its access. For travellers even to so near a place like to put on an air of mystery. There is no one with a fortnight to spare and £20 to spend who cannot walk or bicycle or motor to this place at the right time of the year (for in summer the heat is insupportable and in winter the snow on the high northern plains makes travel difficult). Any one who will take that journey would have a memory to last him all his life.
There are those who say that the popularisation of wonderful things is the spoiling of them. I have never been able to agree. Places are not spoiled by the multitude of those who reach them, but by the character of those who reach them, and no one will journey to this meeting place of the East and the West, I think, save with a desire to wonder and to observe, which of itself breeds reverence. Such men may come in any numbers and the place will be the better for them. At any rate, I repeat, it ought to be known to any one who has the sum or the time to spare, that a revelation of such a kind is quite close at hand, for as yet hundreds of Englishmen with far more than that leisure and infinitely more than that wealth are ignorant of the place and its opportunities; and your quickest way is by Marseilles and Bona, and on your way I beseech you to stop and see Timgad, which is a dead Roman city lying silent and empty under the sun upon the Edge of the Desert.
ASTARTE
If you stand outside the old fortifications of the town of Toul and look eastward toward the German peoples, you see a long even line of hills, very high but not quite mountainous; they end in a sharp dip, and rise again, and terminate in an isolated summit which, like so many of the striking conical peaks of Europe, is dedicated to St. Michael.
These heights, like all the crests which surround the basin of that entrenched camp, are fortified, both with complete works and with connecting trenches and batteries; save in the gap between the isolated hill and the ridge I have mentioned the guns are everywhere. In this gap, in the hollow of it and upon the hillside, is a little village which, like all the villages on the actual line of the encircling forts, is wholly dominated by the soldiery; these furnish it with all its trade, these give it its few adventures and its manner of life. The peasants are woken summer and winter by the sound of bugles; the heavy firing of practice is a usual thing to them; a profitable commerce with a garrison twice as numerous as the civil population enriches those who work upon their land.
In this village there lived one of those families which are poor in a country of free men through their own fault; they had land, of course; no rent was asked of them; they were in a community which had now for many ages administered itself, and had for more than a hundred years forgotten the oppression of a territorial class. Nevertheless, by some vice of temperament, they lived like slatterns, and if they cultivated at all some tiny patch of their ruined and weedy holding, it was but just so much as would keep their souls within their bodies, and they preferred chance begging and barefoot jobs at the railway-station or in the streets of the town. Their house was more a cave than a hut; it was dug out of the hillside, with beaten earth walls, save where the front portion of it jutted out, and was roofed with old bits of corrugated iron borrowed or stolen from the sappers. These were supported by a jumble of ramshackle wood, old railway-sleepers, and here and there were gaps stopped roughly with canvas.
In such a place, surrounded by brothers and sisters of all ages, and the only houseworker to a drunken and worthless mother, lived, by accident, one of those women who have such great power in this world. Her ugliness was singular; it had nothing to do with that power save perhaps to enhance it. Her hair, which was sparse and crisp, was of a bright, unpleasing red, harsh and offensive; her eyes were green and stood very far apart in her head; her mouth was large and very decided and firm. It is not by any recapitulation of her features (though any one who had once seen them would always remember them) that one can give the impression of her power. This rather proceeded from a gesture, a manner, and a whole being which was the continual outer manifestation of a certain kind of soul. There was strength in all her gestures, an upstanding challenge in the poise of her body whether she worked or walked, and a sort of creative handling of things whenever she grasped them which at once arrested the attention of a man. Her excessive poverty and the gross carelessness of her surroundings, by contrast greatly enhanced these things.