Under all ruins is history, as every tourist knows. Indeed, the dust
that gathers above the ruin of cities may be said to be the cover of
the most wonderful of the picture-books of Time, those secret books
into which we sometimes peep. We turn no more, perhaps, than the
corner of a single page in our prying, but we catch a glimpse there
of things so gorgeous, in the book that we are not meant to see, that
it is worth while to travel to far countries, whoever can, to see one
of those books, and where the edges are turned up a little to catch
sight of those strange winged bulls and mysterious kings and
lion-headed gods that were not meant for us. And out of the glimpses
one catches from odd corners of those volumes of Time, where old
centuries hide, one builds up part by guesses, part by fancy mixed
with but little knowledge, a tale or theory of how men and women
lived in unknown ages in the faith of forgotten gods.
Such a people lived in Timgad and left it probably about the time
that waning Rome began to call home her outposts. Long after the
citizens left the city stood on that high plateau in Africa, teaching
shepherd Arabs what Rome had been: even to-day its great arches and
parts of its temples stand: its paved streets are still grooved
clearly with the wheel-ruts of chariots, and beaten down on each side
of the centre by the pairs of horses that drew them two thousand
years ago. When all the clatter had died away Timgad stood there in
silence.
At Pompeii, city and citizens ended together. Pompeii did not mourn
among strangers, a city without a people: but was buried at once,
closed like an ancient book.
I doubt if anyone knows why its gods deserted Luxor, or Luxor lost
faith in its gods, or in itself; conquest from over the desert or
down the Nile, I suppose, or corruption within. Who knows? But one
day I saw a woman come out from the back of her house and empty a
basket full of dust and rubbish right into the temple at Luxor, where
a dark green god is seated, three times the size of a man, buried as
high as his waist. I suppose that what I saw had been happening off
and on pretty well every morning for the last four thousand years.
Safe under the dust that that woman threw, and the women that lived
before her, Time hid his secrets.
And then I have seen the edges of stones in deserts that might or
might not have been cities: they had fallen so long that you could
hardly say.
At all these cities, whether disaster met them, and ruin came
suddenly on to crowded streets; or whether they passed slowly out of
fashion, and grew quieter year by year while the jackals drew nearer
and nearer; at all these cities one can look with interest and not be
saddened by the faintest sorrow—for anything that happened to such a
different people so very long ago. Ram-headed gods, although their
horns be broken and all their worshippers gone; armies whose
elephants have turned against them; kings whose ancestors have
eclipsed their faces in heaven and left them helpless against the
onslaught of the stars; not a tear is given for one of these to-day.
But when in ruins as complete as Pompeii, as desolate as Timgad
amongst its African hills, you see the remnant of a pack of cards
lying with what remains of the stock of a draper’s shop; and the
front part of the shop and the snug room at the back gape side by
side together in equal, misery, as though there had never been a
barrier between the counter with its wares and the good mahogany
table with its decanters; then in the rustling of papers that blow
with dust along long-desolate floors one hears the whisper of
Disaster, saying, “See; I have come.” For under plaster shaken down
by calamity, and red dust that once was bricks, it is our own age
that is lying; and the little things that lie about the floors are
relics of the twentieth century. Therefore in the streets of Bethune
the wistful appeal that is in all things lost far off and utterly
passed away cries out with an insistence that is never felt in the
older fallen cities. No doubt to future times the age that lies under
plaster in Bethune, with thin, bare laths standing over it, will
appear an age of glory; and yet to thousands that went one day from
its streets, leaving all manner of small things behind, it may well
have been an age full of far other promises, no less golden to them,
no less magical even, though too little to stir the pen of History,
busy with batteries and imperial dooms. So that to these, whatever
others may write, the twentieth century will not be the age of
strategy, but will only seem to have been those fourteen lost quiet
summers whose fruits lie under the plaster.
That layer of plaster and brick-dust lies on the age that has gone,
as final, as fatal, as the layer of flints that covers the top of the
chalk and marks the end of an epoch and some unknown geologic
catastrophe.
It is only by the little things in Bethune, lying where they were
left, that one can trace at all what kind of house each was, or guess
at the people who dwelt in it. It is only by a potato growing where
Pavement was, and flowering vigorously under a vacant window, that
one can guess that the battered, house beside it was once a
fruiterer’s shop, whence the potato rolled away when man fell on evil
days, and found the street, no longer harsh and unfriendly; but soft
and fertile like the primal waste, and took root and throve there as
its forbears throve before it in another continent before the coming
of man.
Across the street, in the dust of a stricken house, the implements of
his trade show where a carpenter lived when disaster came so
suddenly, quite good tools, some still upon shelves, some amongst
broken things that lie all over the floor. And further along the
street in which these things are someone has put up a great iron
shutter that was to protect his shop. It has a graceful border of
painted irises all the way up each side. It might have been a
jeweller that would have had such a shutter. The shutter alone
remains standing straight upright, and the whole shop is gone.
And just here the shaken street ends and all the streets end
together. The rest is a mound of white stones and pieces of bricks
with low, leaning walls surrounding it, and the halves of hollow
houses; and eyeing it round a corner, one old tower of the cathedral,
as though still gazing over its congregation of houses, a ruined,
melancholy watcher. Over the bricks lie tracks, but no more streets.
It is about the middle of the town, a hawk goes over, calling as
though he flew over the waste, and as though the waste were his. The
breeze that carries him opens old shutters and flaps them to again.
Old, useless hinges moan; wall-paper whispers. Three French soldiers
trying to find their homes walk over the bricks and groundsel.
It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off in
some fabulous future, nor remembered from terrible ages by the aid
of papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes of
folk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relics
of bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and broken
bricks.