ROMAN CITY OF TIMGAD.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3464, 7 April 1930, Page 7

ROMAN CITY OF TIMGAD.

ruins IX AFRICAN WILDS

Six months ago I stood in a city in which all life seemed frozen dead. From the swelling ridges of the mountains around me. bare, stony,, waterless, manless, and houseless, too, there c-ame a bitter wind so ebill that il might have been blowing across the ice Hoes instead of the walls of North Africa. And. as it xvhimpered in and out among the tall, broken columns and mined cornices, it to be the very voices of the ancient dead, hopeless and disillusioned, who thronged that land 15 centuries ago. writes Major A. \V. Hewlett in the Daily Telegraph. They had lived here in a magnificent city, citizens of an Empire which seemed to them as stable and indestructible as the xvorld itself, but the barbarian hordes were waiting about their doors. In the space of a man’s lifetime the Roman Empire crumpled up. and thousands of cities, not here in North Africa* only, hut in Germany and Gaul, and far-away Britain, too. became as unsown fields, and remain so to this day. For it is odd to remember that this great city of Timgad was in full vigor of life at the same time as Roman London, not to say rriconinm and Silcliester and Coleheste? and others of our rediscovered Boman precursors, and it must have happened that soldiers and traders then 1 often bad been in both. I came out from Batna. that- garrison town in the An res Mountains ilia brought me strange reminiscences of similar .strongholds of our own in Northern India. It had a high stone wall all round it, loopholod and maehicolated, with a great gateway at each end of the main traverse. It was full of soldiers. -1000 of them, and streets of the small cafes and booths which grow pip in garrison towns. The peaks of the xvikl Aures Mountains looked down into it as those about the Kbyber looked down into Peshairnr. From hero it was a 24-mile drive to Timgad. a drive that led mo in and out of the long ridge-like splits of the Aures on a road that merged either side with grey stony plains. 1 passed through Lanibessa, another ruined city from Roman days, still showing its miles of ruins, like an abandoned cemetery, and came on a land wild and sterile as the bod of a dried-up sea. A long sweeping curve suddenly brought ns into view of the vast graveyard city of Timgad. I spent all dav among the ruins, treading those ancient pavements of red sandstone where the marks of the iron chariot xvheeis still rutted the roadway, listening to_ the phantom chatter of women’s voices in those unroofed chambers, and the ghostly shouting of the traffickers in the mar-ket-place. 1 heard the rattle of hoofs, the jingle of harness, and the grinding crunch of wheels go under they mighty threefold arch of Trajan which still lifts its lonic .columns defiantly to wards the dangerous hills. I smelt the reek of the wood fires from a thdnsant hearths which have boon cold for 1500 years. At last 1 went and sat down in the old theatre and followed, sitting in the stone stalls among a crowd of barearmed dames and bearded senators the latest effort of Terence. The stage was there still, as they left it when the barbarians came, and 1 saw the actors, in their giant masks and buskins, and heard their swollen voices re-echoed from the tiers oof bare stones seats above me whilst perfumes of incense and c-edarwood floated across the auditorium. But in a trice the wind blew it all away, and there, below me and around mo, was the dead city again, like a skeleton at the feast, and the two mighty columns of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinas, which still stands on the gigantic plinth of brickwork untbroxvn by the earthquakes as if waiting to uplift some new beacon fire to the sneering hills. Only, instead of a beacon fire, two storks had built their nest on the capital of one of them and were busy tending their young and banding on the torch of life.