CITY OF TIMGAD

Greymouth Evening Star, 31 March 1930, Page 7

CITY OF TIMGAD

RUINS IN 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 ca.me’a bitter wind so chill that it, might have been blowing across the ice floes instead of the walls of North Africa. And, as it whimpered in and out- among the tall, broken columns and ruined .cornices, it seemed to be the very voices of the ancient dead, hopeless and disillusioned, who thronged that land fifteen centuries ago, writes Major A. W. Howlett, 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 world 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, but 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 the full vigour of life .at the same time as Roman London, ,not to say Uriconfium and Silchester and Colchester and others of our rediscovered Roman precursors, and it must have happened that soldiers and traders there often had been in both. I came out from Batua, that garrison town in the Aures Mountains that brought me strange reminiscences of similar strongholds of our own in Northern India. It had a high stone vzall all around it, loopholed and machicolated ’with a great gatewav at each end of the main traverse. It was full of soldiers. 4000 of them, and streets,of the small cafes and booths which grow up in garrison, towns. The peaks of the wild' Aures Mountains looked down into it as those about the Khyber look down into Peshawar. From here it ■was a twenty-four mile drive to Tim.gad, a drive that led me in and out the long ridge-like spurs of the Aures on a road that merged either side with grey stony plains. I passed through Lambessa, another ruined city from Roman days, still showing its miles of ruins, like an abandoned cemetery, and camo on a land wild and sterile as the bed of a dried-up sea. A long sweeping curve suddenly brought us into view of the vast graveyard city of Timgad. I spent all day among the ruins, treading those ancient, pavements of red sandstone where the marks of the iron chariot wheels 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 market-place. I heard the rattle of hoofs, the jingle of harness, and the grinding crunch of wheels go under the mighty threefold arch of Traian which still lifts its lonic columns defiantly towards the dangerous hills. T smelt the reek of the wood fires from a thousand hearths which have been cold for fifteen hundred years.

At. last I 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 I saw the actors, in their giant masks and buskins, and heard their swollen voices re-echoed from the tiers of bare stone seats above me whilst perfumes

of incense and cedarwood floated across the auditorium. But, in a trice the wind blow it all away, and there below me and around me, was the dead city again, like a skeleton at the feast, and the two mighty columns of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinas, which still stand on the gigantic plinth of brickwork unthrown 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 handing on the torch of life. ' _______