Dido’s City of a Million People Now the Site of Cafes and Railway Station

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 608, 9 March 1929, Page 18

Dido’s City of a Million People Now the Site of Cafes and Railway Station

(Written for THE SL S by 11. \V. Young J BARTH AGE' What mind I pictures t h e name ! founded by Queen Dido, mistress of the Mediterranean and rival of Rome! Ten miles from the city of Tunis its power was centred and the agonies of its fall enacted. Dong slopes run up from the sea to the Byrsa Ilill, the site of the citadel, the last defence of Carthage, with its triple wails. Here, the Basilica of St. Louis now stands, commemorating the death of the French King when returning from a crusade in the year 1270. Close to it is the Maison Lavigerie. a fine museum founded by the White Friars, fit is here, by the ; way, that the next Eucharistic Con gress of the Catholic world is to be held.) Looking across the Gulf of' Tunis, wide, placid and blue, as the j Mediterranean can be, extends the purple chain of hills that culminate in I i the sharp twin peaks of Bou Kornine I and Djebel Recass, the mountain oi )

lead. Lastwards the gentler slopes are covered with vineyards, where the famous via de Carthage is produced. The wide, marshy shallows of the lake of Tunis, the haunt of innumerable flocks of seabirds, stretch shining southwards, and lifting out of it between sea and sky; Tunis, far spreading its dazzle of roofs, domes and minarets to the sun, looks like a city of mirage. Northward, on a little promontory, crowned by a lighthouse, an Arab village gleams startlingly white amid rich vegetation. It is disappointing that so little remains of the great cities which were successively built and destroyed here. You peer into excavations and climb over rough walls and crumbled columns, to find that a few ruined foundations, tombs and cisterns, and the Circular Harbours, are all that is left of Phoenician Carthage. Of the Roman city, built on the original foundations and destroyed in its turn by the Arab invaders, more vestiges exist —widely scattered ruins of theatres, basilicas, villas and baths,

temple sand tombs, ample to interest one afresh in the history of the Chris - tian city and in the stories of Augustine, Perpetua and Felicitas. In the museums of the White Friars and the Aloui in Tunis are collected all that remains of statuary, pottery and coins —Punic, Roman and Christian. Even with the aid of these, and of what history you can remember, Carthage is somehow harder to reconstruct in imagination than Rome or Athens. The beginnings of these may be pictured more or less vividly, but tbe story of Dido, tbe Phoenician origins, the gigantic figures of Hannibal and Hasdrubal, all seem more like myth than history. Probably there are other Aucklanders who will remember the dominating personality of Henry Worthington, once head master of Wellesley Street East School, and his lectures on the Punic wars. One recalls some of the

Sidi-Bou-Saitlj an Ai'ab Village Impressions gathered then—the determination of Rome to sea-power, to match and destroy the hated Carthaginian—the elephants In battle —the famine of the seige and the final capitulation, and you are astonished to find yourself on the site of these moving incidents of the dim backward of time. One almost comes to resent the futility of human effort when contemplating the remains of that “which once was great,” and asks "endeavour,

why so painful? Attainment, why so temporary?” What came of all the ] planning and building, the scheming and fighting? We know little beyond the rivalry of states, the heroism of a few leaders, the blood and tears of peoples; and the end? A few mounds of rubbish and so many pages of doubtful history. Where once towered and extended a city of a million people is now suburban villadom, with a little railway station and a few cafes for holiday-makers. You tramp the slopes and beaches, not a shard or stone but has felt the touch of Carthaginian, Roman, Arab and Christian, yet all their works have gone down In ruin, all they strove for is naught. Must our cultures and empires also disappear Into the dust of oblivion? Shall we be as unimportant to jhe future as Carthage is to us ■ —a broken story, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? Will London and New Y'ork, Paris and Berlin, also disappear in dusty obscurity when their days are done?

A few miles further north is La Marsa, where the Bey of Tunis, the titular ruler of the Regency, spends the hot season in a palace near the shore, surrounded by fine gardens.

Here, also, French official Tunis passes the summer. A stroll through sandy lanes leads to the Arab village of Sidi-bou-Said, already noticed. A near approach brings no disillusion, it is spotlessly clean. Houses and shops are square, flat or dome roofed, without chimneys, painted white with skyblue dors and jalousies. Very quiet It is, a few Arabs in a cafe, a water carrier and two donkeys, and a small boy who salutes you politely, nothing else moving. We climb the lighthouse, and from the lantern gallery enjoy a wide vista of the inexhaustible beauty of this storied land and sea, and descending hear from a nearby minaret a muezzin chanting his call to the faithful to prayer, “La illali Allah,” as the sun goes down.