for the desert beyond, I found that there was a good road which the
French had built going along a valley under Aurès, but that the distance
was over twenty miles. I wasted the daylight bargaining, for no one
would drive me twenty miles for less than sixteen shillings. It was
late, and in my eagerness to bargain I missed the chance of a daylight
march, for it was within an hour of sunset when the night driver who was
to start on the Tebessa road (which runs near Timgad) a little later
refused me. The poorer people whom I asked told me that no one else was
going eastward along that lonely valley, but that, if I were to reach
Timgad, I must make a night march of it or wait a night over in Batna
itself at an inn.
[Sidenote: Lamboesis]
Adventure is never to be refused, so I went out eastward alone under the
evening, and I was well rewarded, though I went hungry for hours and was
afoot nearly all the way, for I saw a great sight under the sunset, and
I met a man I shall never meet again.
The sight I saw was Lambèse, which was called Lamboesis by the Romans,
and this is what stamps it upon the mind of a lonely man before
nightfall: not what remains, for hardly anything remains, but that the
fragments which remain of it should be so far apart.
[Sidenote: The Praetorian Tower]
There is a sort of long cup or hollow here pointing at a spur of the
Atlas—that high mountain which holds up the sky. The big lift of Aurès
is on one side of this hollow, mixing into the clouds, and on the other
are isolated and uninhabited high hills. The very floor of this valley
is as high as the top of Cader Idris is in Wales; the heights beyond are
as high as the Pyrenees; and an air of desertion haunts the place. It is
impossible to forget that the Sahara is near by, down beyond the crest
of the range. For though the land is muddy and the sky full of rough
clouds and rain, yet the rain seems to make no grass and the land is
bare. In such a world there stands up before one a square and hardly
ruined tower.
[Sidenote: The Vastness of Lambèse]
A man of northern Europe looking at this thing from the high road cannot
but think it Jacobean (if he is English) or (if he is German or French)
a thing of the Thirty Years’ War. It might be later perhaps, the freak
of some Highland landlord or the relic of some local rebellion. It is
older than our language by far, and almost older than the Faith. As one
looks at it one cannot feel but only know its age, and one watches it up
an avenue of stones wondering why it stands so lonely. But one’s wonder
has no stuff in it till one goes on half a mile and more: by the
roadside is a pile of Roman stones. These also stood in Lamboesis. Then,
feeling himself yet within the walls of an unseen city, a man looks back
over the stretch he has come and is appalled. In such a gaze you look
westward towards the light beyond the mountains. The valley is already
dark. The high road which the French have made glistens as hard as stone
under the last light. Trees are still visible, especially the few
mournful and hard pyramids of the cypress, but the little village, the
modern prison (for there is a prison), and the rare labourers here and
there are muffled up in twilight; and there lies before one a mere
emptiness, beyond which, a long way off, dwindled to quite little, is
the Praetorian Tower. A sharp memory of childhood from beyond years of
common experience so strikes the mind.
The spread plain with its one central tower seems infinite; it is now
without hedges or trees or roofs or men; but once the Legion had filled
up everything.
[Sidenote: The Driver Passes]
It was all quite bare as I surveyed it—more bare than a heath or a down,
and as large as any landscape you may know.
While I was watching this empty space, and surmising what contrast it
would make with the famous and crowded ruins of Timgad to which this
Lamboesis had been a neighbouring city, as Chichester is to Arundel—or,
better still, as Portsmouth and its armament is to Southampton and its
trade—I heard the rumble of heavy and fast wheels, and a man driving a
coach passed me and then pulled up at my hail. He was the same man who
had refused my bargain an hour and more before. He was driving the night
coach to Tebessa. Not understanding men, he raised his price. I told him
that I would pay him only what I had offered at Batna, _less_ the price
of the miles I had gone. He would not yield, but he did these three
things: first, he promised to send word, as he passed, to an old Soldier
who kept a house near Timgad that a traveller was on the road; secondly,
he gave me advice, telling me that I should freeze to death by night in
that valley (for it was growing cold and the weather would not hold
under such a sky); thirdly, he informed me of the exact distance, which
was at the thirty-second stone, where there is a branch road to the
right, leading in half an hour up the slopes of the range to Timgad.
Then he drove on, and I spent what was left of a doubtful light in
pressing onwards.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Cold]
A great mass of snow had recently covered the peaks, and in the valley
up which I was trudging freezing gusts and very sharp scurries of cold
rain disturbed the traveller. I had already passed the last ruins of the
Romans and had seen, far off in the dusk, the last arch of the Legions
standing all alone with one big tree beside it. The west was wild-red
under the storm, and it was cut like a fret with the jagged edge of the
Sierras, quite black, when I saw against the purple of a nearer hill the
white cloak of an Arab.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Arab]
He drove a little cart—a light cart with two wheels. His horse was of
such a sort as you may buy any day in Africa for ten pounds, that is, it
was gentle, strong, swift, and small, and looked in the half-light as
though it did not weigh upon the earth but as though it were accustomed
to running over the tops of the sea. I said to the Arab: “Will you not
give me a lift?” He answered: “If it is the will of God.” Hearing so
excellent an answer, and finding myself a part of universal fate, I
leapt into his cart and he drove along through the gloaming, and as he
went he sang a little song which had but three notes in it, and each of
these notes was divided from the next by only a quarter of a note. So he
sang, and so I sat by his side.
At last he saw that it was only right to break into talk, if for no
other reason than that I was his guest; so he said quite suddenly,
looking straight before him:
“I am very rich.”
“I,” said I, “am moderately poor.”
At this he shook his head and said: “I am more fortunate than you; I am
very, very rich.” He then wagged his head again slowly from side to side
and was silent for a good minute or more.
He next said slyly, with a mixture of curiosity and politeness: “My
Lord, when you say you are poor you mean poor after the manner of the
Romans, that is, with no money in your pocket but always the power to
obtain it.”
“No,” said I, “I have no land, and not even the power of which you
speak. I am really, though moderately, poor. All that I get I earn by
talking in public places in the cold weather, and in spring time and
summer by writing and by other tricks.” He looked solemn for a moment,
and then said: “Have you, indeed, no land?” I said “No” again; for at
that moment I had none. Then he replied: “I have sixteen hundred acres
of land.”
When he had said this he tossed back his head in that lion-like way they
have, for they are as theatrical as children or animals, and he went on:
“Yes, and of these one-fourth is in good fruit-trees ... they bear ...
they bear ... I cannot contain myself for well-being.” “God give you
increase,” said I. “A good word,” said he, “and I would say the same to
you but that you have nothing to increase with. However, it is the will
of God. ‘To one man it comes, from another it goes,’ said the Berber,
and again it is said, ‘Which of you can be certain?’”
These last phrases he rattled off like a lesson with no sort of unction:
it was evidently a form. He then continued:
“I have little rivulets running by my trees. He-from-whom-I-bought had
let them go dry; I nurtured them till they sparkled. They feed the roots
of my orchard. I am very rich. Some let their walls fall down; I prop
them up; nay, sometimes I rebuild. All my roofs are tiled with tiles
from Marseilles.... I am very rich.” Then I took up the psalm in my
turn, and I said:
“What is it to be rich if you are not also famous? Can you sing or dance
or make men laugh or cry by your recitals? I will not ask if you can
draw or sculpture, for your religion forbids it, but do you play the
instrument or the flute? Can you put together wise phrases which are
repeated by others?”
To this he answered quite readily: “I have not yet attempted to do any
of these things you mention: doubtless were I to try them I should
succeed, for I have become very rich, and a man who is rich in money
from his own labour could have made himself rich in any other thing.”
When he said this I appreciated from whence such a doctrine had invaded
England. It had come from the Orientals. I listened to him as he went
on: “But it is no matter; my farm is enough for me. If there were no men
with farms, who would pay for the flute and the instrument and the wise
beggar and the rest? Ah! who would feed them?”
“None,” said I, “you are quite right.” So we went quickly forward for a
long time under the darkness, saying nothing more until a thought moved
him. “My father was rich,” he said, “but I am far richer than my
father.”
It was cold, and I remembered what a terrible way I had to go that
night—twenty miles or more through this empty land of Africa. So I was
shivering as I answered: “Your father did well in his day, and through
him you are rich. It says, ‘Revere your father: God is not more to
you.’” He answered: “You speak sensibly; I have sons.” Then for some
time more we rode along upon the high wheels.
But in a few minutes the lights of a low steading appeared far off under
poplar-trees, and as he waved his hand towards it he said: “That is my
farm.” “Blessed be your farm,” said I, “and all who dwell in it.” To
this he made the astonishing reply: “God will give it to you; I have
none.” “What is that you say?” I asked him in amazement. He repeated the
phrase, and then I saw that it was a form, and that it was of no
importance whether I understood it or not. But I understood the next
thing which he said as he stopped at his gates, which was: “Here, then,
you get out.” I asked him what I should pay for the service, and he
replied: “What you will. Nothing at all.” So I gave him a franc, which
was all I had in silver. He took it with a magnificent salutation,
saying as he did so: “I can accept nothing from you,” which, I take it,
was again a form. Then the night swallowed him up, and I shall never see
him again till that Great Day in which we both believed but of which
neither of us could know anything at all.
* * * * *
We were born, I cannot tell how many leagues apart, in different
climates and for different destinies, but we were two men together in
the night, and, for a short time, we were very near each other compared
with the distance of the stars, or with the distance that separates any
two philosophers.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Goat-Story Again]
Many who read this will say they know the Mohammedan better than I. They
will be right: then let them explain the story of the goats, for I
cannot. I will repeat it to save them the trouble of turning back.
A young man of Ain-Yagout, hearing that the Government had carefully
planted little cedars on a distant hill, drove his goats fifteen miles
to browse upon the same. “Better,” said he, “that I should flourish than
the Government, and that my goats should give milk than that these silly
little trees should fatten.”
They caught him and brought him before the magistrate, where he
confessed what he had done, and even that he had lifted the goats
laboriously, one by one, over a high wall to get at the Government
trees. But when they asked him what good reason he could give for his
conduct, he replied:
“_R’aho!_ It was the will of God. _Mektoub_, it was written.”
Or words to that effect.
I will admit that when the full lips, the long uncertain eye and the
tall forehead of the true Arab met me in these short travels I was
always half silenced and half moved to question and to learn. But I saw
such Oriental features rarely, for, in spite of the turban and the
bernous, they are very rare.
[Sidenote: The Moor]
Indeed, of all the men I came across in this country, only two were of
the purely Oriental kind the books make out to be so common. One was a
fierce Moor of gigantic stature and incredible girth. He was dressed in
bright green, and drank the cordial called _crême de menthe_ in a little
bower. The other was a poor Arab and old, who sold fruits upon a stall
in Setif. In his face there was a deep contempt of Christendom.
[Sidenote: The Little Old Semite]
The snow fell all around him swiftly, mixed with sleet and sharp needles
of cold rain. It was evening and the people were passing down the street
hurriedly to find their homes: so passed I, when I saw him standing like
a little stunted ghost in the rain. He knew me at once for some one to
whom Africa was strange, and therefore might have hoped to make me stop
even upon such a night to buy of him. Yet he did not say a word, but
only looked at me as much as to say: “Fool! will you buy?” And I looked
back at him as I passed, and put my answer into my eyes as much as to
say: “No! Barbarian, I will not buy.” In this way we met and parted, and
we shall never see each other again till that Great Day....
[Illustration]
* * * * *
Remembering him and this last one who had given me a ride, I went on
through the night towards Timgad.
It was a very lonely road.
[Sidenote: The Lonely Night March]
Loneliness, when it is absolute, is very difficult to depict, for it is
a negation and lacks quality, and therefore words fail it. But one may
express the loneliness of that valley best by saying that it felt, not
as though men had deserted it, but as though men had perpetually tried
to return to it and, as perpetually, had despaired and left the sullen
earth. The impression was false. The Romans had once thoroughly
possessed and tilled this land: the scrub had once been forests, the
shifting soil ordered and bounded fields; but the Mohammedan sterility
had sunk in so deeply that one could not believe that our people had
ever been here. Even the sharp and recent memory of those ruins of
Lamboesis faded in the stillness. Europe came back into my mind. The
full rivers and the fields which are to us a natural landscape are but a
made garden and are due to continuous tradition, and I wondered whether,
if that tradition were finally lost, our sons would come to see, in
England as I saw here in the night in Africa, vague hills without trees
and drifts of mould and sand through which the rain-bursts would dig
deep channels at random.
There was a moon risen by this time, but it lay behind a level flow of
clouds. All along the way, to my right, made smaller by the darkness,
lay Aurès—one could still just discern the snow upon his summits. The
road went on—French, exact, and, if I may say so, alien—bridging this
barbaric void which already smelt of the desert where it lay beyond
those mountains down under the southern wall of Atlas. For the desert,
when I had seen Timgad, I determined to strike.
[Sidenote: The Columns of Timgad]
So the road went on, and I with it till I came to the thirty-second
stone, and recognised its number by holding a match close by. Then I
knew that I had covered twenty miles and was close to Timgad. A branch
road opened out on the right, and there was a sign-post pointing along
it. I followed the new road across a careful girder bridge such as might
cross a brook in Normandy. I saw a light up on the rise of the
foot-hills, and beyond it, suddenly and yet dimly, a very mob of
columns. They stood up against the vague glimmer of the sky of every
size and in thousands, as though they were marching. A little rift in
the clouds let in the moon upon them palely. Her light was soon
extinguished, but in that moment I had seen a large city, unroofed and
dead, in the middle of this wasted land.
[Sidenote: The Old Soldier]
However men may act who see a vision but see it in extreme fatigue, so
did I. I suffered the violent impression of that ghost, but my curiosity
was no longer of the body. I took no step to see the wonder which this
gleam had hinted at, but I turned and struck at the door of the house
which was now quite near me, and which was still lit within. An old man,
small, bent, and full of energy, opened the door to me. He was that
soldier of whom they had told me at Lambèse.
“I was expecting you,” he said.
I remembered that the driver had promised to warn him, and I was
grateful.
“I have prepared you a meal,” he went on. Then, after a little
hesitation, “It is mutton: it is neither hot nor cold.”
A man who has been on guard as often as had this old sergeant need not
mind awakening in the small hours, and a man who has marched twenty
miles and more in the dark must eat what he is given, though it be sheep
and tepid. So I sat down. He brought me their very rough African wine
and a loaf, and sat down opposite me, looking at me fixedly under the
candle. Then he said:
“To-morrow you will see Timgad, which is the most wonderful town in the
world.”
“Certainly not to-night,” I answered; to which he said, “No!”
[Sidenote: The Strange Food]
I took a bite of the food, and he at once continued rapidly: “Timgad is
a marvel. We call it ‘the marvel.’ I had thought of calling this house
‘Timgad the Marvel,’ or, again, ‘Timgad the——’”
“Is this sheep?” I said.
“Certainly,” he answered. “What else could it be but sheep?”
“Good Lord!” I said, “it might be anything. There is no lack of beasts
on God’s earth.” I took another bite and found it horrible.
“I desire you to tell me frankly,” said I, “whether this is goat. There
are many Italians in Africa, and I shall not blame any man for giving me
goat’s flesh. The Hebrew prophets ate it and the Romans; only tell me
the truth, for goat is bad for me.”
He said it was not goat. Indeed, I believed him, for it was of a large
and terrible sort, as though it had roamed the hills and towered above
all goats and sheep. I thought of lions, but remembered that their value
would forbid their being killed for the table. I again attempted the
meal, and he again began:
“Timgad is a place——”
At this moment a god inspired me, and I shouted, “Camel!” He did not
turn a hair. I put down my knife and fork, and pushed the plate away. I
said:
“You are not to be blamed for giving me the food of the country, but for
passing it under another name.”
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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Illustration]
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.
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.
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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.