TIMGAD AND VOLUBILIS: THE OUTPOSTS OF THE DESERT

The dead cities of the Roman Empire are few in number compared with the survivals; and the base of all our civilisation was the city, the town, walled, jealous of its private life, having its own gods and its own traditions. The Roman Empire left each city singularly free, subject only to very general laws; able to preserve what language it had inherited or acquired, to levy its own local taxes, to make its own legal regulations. The modern conception of a great state enforcing uniformity upon all its citizens was abhorrent to the Roman idea, and that is why that great reservoir from which all our streams descend was universally accepted and formed a happy and united world-state. Nearly all its towns have survived. There are few English towns prior to the industrial revolution which had not a Roman ancestry; very many of those which seem to be separate from the old Roman site in England grew up naturally on its suburbs, where the land was cheaper and where long habitation had not brought congestion and disease.

But here and there, from various causes, a town died out. Palmyra was swamped by Islam and the desert; even in England where Roman continuity is so marked, Wroxeter and Silchester decayed, we know not how or why—perhaps because the line of travel left them. In Gaul, Alesia has gone, and some half-a-dozen others; Pompeii and Herculaneum are the two most famous which perished in a natural catastrophe, and when one was dug out from its ashes, Pompeii, it retained so many monuments of domestic life that attention has ever since been fixed upon them.

But of the dead Roman towns, two have a special place in my memories of travel, because they were outposts, holding the cause of civilisation against the desert, and casting a challenge, as it were, against the forces which bit into the frontiers of the Empire and at last broke them down.

These two towns which fell into the void, in part through the gaining of the sand, but more through the gaining of the barbarian, are Timgad and Volubilis, the one in Algiers, the other in Morocco. Each stands at the southernmost edge of what the civilised men thought it possible to hold permanently as a city; each overlooks wide spaces of what is now to our Northern eyes desert, and even to the eyes of men native to those climates, burning and arid soil. Each has wholly perished. Each is being restored to the modern eye; the one—Timgad—has reappeared almost in its entirety; the other—Volubilis—is in process of excavation, and we shall shortly have there, as at Timgad, the columns set up again upon their bases, some restoration of the ways, the plan of the whole affair expressed, and its skeleton, so to speak, reconstructed sufficiently for us to imagine what the living thing must have been.

The French, who control both these sites, have been blamed for restoring so much. They have been blamed for exercising this vice or virtue in many other things: in the restoration of their cathedrals and of the pagan remains of antiquity in France itself. Thus I suppose that half the outer stones of Laon are new. Carcassonne is a modern reconstruction of an ancient thing. The rediscovered lower courses of the amphitheatre of Paris are nearly all faced with new stone—and so on. The excuse of the French in so acting is that but for restoration all would fall into ruin. The criticism of their action lies in this: that the restoration masks the original and deceives the looker-on. Upon the whole, I think the French have the best of the argument; it is better to have a restored, and, therefore, a permanent, witness to tradition, than a meaningless heap of stones; it is better to have the front of Notre Dame in Paris, to which Viollet-le-Duc added all those imitated statues of the Middle Ages, and gargoyles not of the thirteenth century, but from his nineteenth-century workshop, than to have shapeless things. At any rate, the French have restored Timgad, and they are beginning to restore Volubilis.

The first of these—Timgad—lies on the northern slope of that great mountain of Aurès, from the southern shoulder of which one gazes out towards the endlessness of the Sahara. The second stands on an upland shelf within a mile or two of the hill town of the Moors, Mulay Idris, north of Meknez, and gazes also southwards over wastes only a little less desolate under a burning sun, and having, far away to the south, the huge, dull, unbroken line, the monstrous Hogback, of the greater Atlas. Because it is nearer to the sea winds of the Atlantic, the plain over which Volubilis looks is more habitable than that of Timgad. Even far away to the south upon the Atlas there are trees. But to our Northern eyes, although the French are now colonising it, it seems a most inhospitable land, parched and irredeemable. The people of the place think otherwise. It has a civilisation of its own for many a day’s journey southward. The famous fountains and shady courts of Fez are not so far away. Within an hour or two by motor you have the very large modern port of Casablanca. But the Romans rightly thought that upon placing their town here they had an outpost and would go no further, for the life lived further south is not natural to our race.

Timgad impresses me more powerfully with the past than any other place I know, much more than Pompeii, more, even, than Silchester, which I visit once a year also to recover in its crumbling city wall and its earthen amphitheatre the roots of our life. In Silchester nothing shows except the broken city wall and that earthen mound. Timgad is all exposed; there is the theatre, there are the tall columns standing as in the forum of Rome itself; there are the dolphin-carved marble arms of the seats in the market-place; there is the Triumphal Arch—a great city, and all quite silent. This silence, which has the effect of a living death haunted by the past, the French have enhanced by conducting water again to its fountain, and you hear the plashing of the stream emphasising that emptiness of silence all about. If a man will wander in Timgad long enough of a spring morning, especially if he come late in the season, when the rare visitors no longer reach the place, he will feel arising in himself two lives, the life of his own time which he knows and which has made him, and the life of that immemorial past. It is a terrible, a dangerous, but a fascinating experience.

In Volubilis the experience is other. You have no feeling of haunting, of death, or of isolation; there are olive groves about you; there is scanty grass; the lovely little Moorish town of Mulay Idris lies just beyond the dip close at hand; a mountain not wholly barren, clothed with scrub, stands up behind it against the east. Here the impression is rather one of history and of contrast. Here you see how completely the new religion of Islam flooded and drowned the classical and Christian tradition.

The contrast between the few stones still unearthed at Volubilis and Mohammedan Mulay Idris, close at hand, is the contrast between a Poussin or a David and an arabesque of Toledo. It is the contrast between the superbly simple replica of Inigo Jones which forms the façade of the English School at Rome and the Mosque of Cordova—two worlds wholly distinct; the one that pagan and late Christian world of which we are the children: we live by our return to its noble classic lines; the other, the fantasy which the Mohammedan developed from the Byzantine. Both these places also have about them a character which I love in many a spot I have visited, I mean the character of isolation. The very power of modern civilisation to carry men too rapidly from place to place in a mechanical fashion has left more isolated than ever any place just off the main lines. Of all those who go down to Biskra by the railway from Constantine, or who motor down to that desert oasis by the great French military road, how many have turned those short twenty miles aside to steep themselves in Timgad? And of such few as are beginning to visit Morocco and are grown familiar with Meknez, fewer still make the day’s journey northward to Mulay Idris. How many even of these cross the narrow valley to look at what may be to them the meaningless stones of Volubilis? It is a good thing that it should be so. In all my many visits to Silchester I have never found another man gazing at those stones or climbing up the earth of the amphitheatre; and Europe and Barbary are full of such silences. I am glad of it.