THE HILL OF CARTHAGE

On a day while spring was still calm upon the Mediterranean and before the great heats had come, I sat in a small simple restaurant, French in management and cooking, half-way up a slope that overlooked the Tunisian Sea. Save for the modest house attached to the place, for one or two villas surrounded by deep gardens, for a small halt (rather than a station) upon a local tramway, there was little habitation around me. One great French road went up the hill behind. No vehicle moved upon it.

In the spring sunlight of that noon the Angelus bell from a church upon the height broke the silence, but for the rest it was an empty place enough, with no hint of the past; a hillside like any other, not even covered by a village; a little stopping-place upon a suburban tram line, ten miles from the neighbouring capital.

That hill, that bay, were the Hill and the Bay of Carthage.

Over the ground where I sat at meat the Roman Army roared up in the last moments of the final siege. This quiet, empty slope of deserted ground had been filled with fire and carnage. On the summit where now a private house or two and one new church barely break the empty, rounded height, a vast glory of colonnade and portico massed upward to the dominating chief Temple of Moloch, where the nobility of Carthage made their last resistance and died of their own wills. Before that dreadful day, for half a millennium, the greatest and proudest of human cities had overlooked its ports and stood white and enormous above its wide bay, drawing into itself the fleets of the East and sending out its merchants and its adventurers and its Governors of Empire throughout its world. Nothing remains. The round inner harbours of the city in which those men-of-war were ranked have dwindled to sleepy ponds. The quays and the wharves and the warehouses of a million men have disappeared. There is no noise at all, except the little lap of water upon sand.

Fragments of the great aqueduct are to be found upon the plain, also fragments of the cisterns, fragments of the walls here and there, but nothing apparent. The immense affair has gone for ever, and in its place is nothingness.

There are very many places in the world, no doubt, where something of this emotion is called up and something of the wonder that such great human things can utterly vanish; but nowhere do I find that lesson impressed as it is impressed upon the site of Carthage; upon that hillside above the sea where Carthage once was.

Hippo, the town of St. Augustine, is striking enough with its poor fragments of ruin remaining alone to testify to its greatness, and its site turned into a mile of vineyard; the bulk of the Numidian Cæsarea of which I have just written, the capital where the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra kept her court, is turned to gardens; and in our own country Silchester of which I have written and Wroxeter fill me deeply with the same sense of mortality, arousing in me the same question as to how the traces of man can so finally leave the earth. But here in Carthage the example is more complete and on a far greater scale.

Here was the second city of the world; a city that was at one time not second, but first. Here lived that great merchant aristocracy which has been compared with our own and with that of Venice. Here stood and functioned that famous polity which Aristotle admired as the best he knew; solid, square, free from turmoil; contemptuously certain of mastery by sea, apparently immune from disaster, and taking its own good fortune for granted.

It has gone altogether. No man to-day can even muse within its ruins as he can muse within the ruins of Timgad or Volubilis. There has been a complete clearance, an uprooting, a visible death. It is amazing.

I have read somewhere that negative things cannot impress the mind; that mere absence, a mere void leaves no stamp upon the memory. I may have thought so before I first stood (so many years ago!) upon the lift of the Byrsa, on the slight slope of what had been the citadel of so famous a state. But since that date I have always known that the death of things can be impressive as the death of men. The other day when I came back to Carthage after so long a space my earlier feeling was redoubled.

This then is the end of what men do upon the surface of the earth during their little passage through the daylight!

The mighty city, I suppose, had its great musicians, and its poets. It bred its great soldiers. One of them ranks with the greatest captains of time. It felt itself necessarily eternal. It has vanished altogether.

I have marvelled often enough how the thing could physically be done. Is it the perpetual work of the earth covering old stones, or the quarrying of men, or what, that obliterates such mighty cities? At any rate they disappear.

I concluded as I returned that night from Carthage through the evening that our ignorance of the past is an abyss.

We do not know how human culture began; for the fullest expression of it in the most enduring material may, it would seem, be dissipated like smoke. We know, of course, that all the argument upon prehistory and the rest is guess-work and all the violent assertion made by popular writers upon it is merely charlatan. But there is more than that. There arises from the contemplation of Carthage hill a conviction that any state may be lost with all its records. We know not what or how many may not have sunk in the profundity of time and perished altogether. We know not how far back stretch the gorgeous cities and the full pageant of culture.

It is with the race as with the individual member of the race. We come out of a darkness which we cannot pierce. We are for a moment in the light. And of what is to come we know nothing.

_Part IV_

_France_