A white-robed monk paced slowly along the path with his breviary, and a bush of rosemary gave out a faint aromatic scent as my skirts brushed it in passing. A small boy was herding a flock of goats by the shattered ruins of the amphitheatre, and I wandered from one group of stones to another, all that was left of a great and famous city. I was shown fragments of Roman villas with mosaic pavements, private entrances from them to the theatre where only a broken column or two remains to show the glories of what had once been. Nearly all the finds of any value have been taken to the Bardo Museum at Tunis. Here there is almost nothing. A soft wind stirred the grass growing between the blocks of fallen masonry, a tiny lizard ran swiftly across one of the grey stone seats, far off in the gentian blue of the Gulf showed a feather of dark smoke. The silence was so intense that one could almost hear the rustle of the lizard’s feet. One’s mind swung giddily backwards through the past centuries. More than ever one had the sensation of the inexorable tide of Time, carrying into oblivion the painfully acquired civilisations of the world. Each so absorbed, so confident, and of them all what is left? The crumbling fragile bones in the museum, and a tiny chip of blue mosaic in the dust at my feet, seemed the only answer.