Part 7

“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.

These will detain the traveller for as long as he may choose to regard them, so violently do they impress him with the negation of time. It is said that in certain abnormal moods things infinitely great and infinitely little are present together in the mind: that vast spaces of the imagination and minute contacts of the finger-tips are each figured in the brain, the one not driving out the other. In such moods (it is said) proportion and reality grow faint, and the unity and poise of our limited human powers are in peril. Into such a mood is a man thrown by Timgad, and especially by these two pillars of white stone. They proceed so plainly from the high conceptions of man: so much were their sculptors what we are in every western character: so fully do they satisfy us: so recent and clean is the mark of the tool upon them that they fill a man with society and leave him ready to meet at once a living city full of his fellows. It only needs a spoken word or the clack of a sandal to be back into the moment when all these things were alive. And meanwhile, with that impression overpowering one’s sense, there, physically present, is a desolation so complete that measure fails it. No oxen moving: no smoke: no roof among the rare trees of the horizon: no gleam of water and no sound. It is as though not certain centuries but an incalculable space of days coexisted with the present, and as though, for one eternal moment, a vision of the absolute in which time is not were permitted—for no good—to the yet embodied soul.

[Sidenote: The Stranger]

I do not know what was the hour in which I turned and left this sight, and leaving by the southern gate made for the mountain range of Aurès. But it was yet early afternoon, and the track had risen but little into the hills when I saw, some little way off, seated upon a great squared stone which had lain there since the departure of our people, a man of a kind I had not met in Africa before.

By his dress he was rather a colonist than a native, for he wore no turban—indeed his head was bare; but his long cloak was cut in an unusual shape, covering him almost entirely; it was dark and made of some stuff that had certainly not been woven in a modern loom. He saluted me as I came.

When I approached him and saluted him in return, his face could be seen inspired with a peculiar power, which, at a distance, his attitude alone had discovered. It was not easy to be sure whether its lines were drawn from Italy or from those rare exceptions wherein the east seems sometimes to surpass our own race in force and dignity. His forehead was low and very broad, his hair short, crisp, strong, and of the colour of steel; his lips, which were thin and controlled, had in their firm outline something of a high sadness, and his whole features recalled those which tradition gives to the makers and destroyers of religions. But it was his eyes that gave him so singular and (as I can still believe though the adventure is now long past) so magical an influence. These were in colour like the sea in March, grey-green and full of light, or like some mountain stones which when they are polished show the same translucent and natural hue, shining from within with vivid changes; but, much more than their luminous colour, their expression arrested me, for it had in it an experience of immense horizons, and resembled that which may sometimes be caught in the eyes of birds who have seen the earth from the heights of the sky.

I first spoke and asked him whether I was well upon the path that would lead me under Aurès, through the pass, to the sandstone hills from whose summits one could see the desert for which I was bound.

Whether Timgad had disturbed me, or his speech had in it that something which at the time I feared, I cannot tell; but the very short dialogue we had together influenced me in my loneliness for a whole day, as a vivid dream will do. I will therefore write it down.

He rose and answered me that I was on a good path all the way, and that there was plenty of lodging: that the road was safe, and that my map would be an ample guide.

“From the other side of Aurès,” he said, “you will see one ridge of red rocks beyond another. Even the furthest has some scrub upon it upon this side, but from its summit you will see the desert, and on this side it is easy to climb.”

MYSELF: “And how is the southern side towards the Sahara?”

HE: “It is all precipice, but from the northern side you can cast about and find a path which creeps down the end of the ridge to an oasis of palm-trees. These are very numerous and evident from the height. When you reach them you will find a large river flowing towards the desert, a great road and a railway. It is easy to return.”

All this I knew already from my reading, and from my map, but I listened to him for the sake of the tones of his voice: these had a sort of laugh in them when he added that I should be glad to get back to water, to trees and to men.

MYSELF: “But there is, as you say and know, no danger on this road from the tribes or from beasts.”

HE: “No. Very little.”

MYSELF: “What other danger can there be?”

He answered that many who saw the desert learnt more than they desired to learn.