It is natural to compare Timgad with Pompeii, and the comparison has often been made. But beyond the fact that both were towns of the Roman Empire, and that the ruins of both have been preserved to an extent unparalleled elsewhere, they have no great resemblance. It happened to me, as probably it has happened to few, two or three weeks after leaving Timgad, while the memory of it was fresh, to stand once again in the Forum of Pompeii. I recalled their different conditions. They were not contemporary; Pompeii was destroyed before Timgad was built; Pompeii, rather Greek than Roman in origin, was a pleasure town of the first century, which, after damage by an earthquake at the zenith of its prosperity, was overwhelmed by ashes from Vesuvius; Timgad was a military and commercial town of the second and third centuries, ruined first by religious faction and financial breakdown, and finally overthrown of set purpose by a horde of mountaineers. To compare them is like comparing the Tunbridge Wells of the eighteenth century with the Pretoria of the twentieth. The contrasts their ruins present are those we should expect. Timgad is more solid and more serious; its public buildings are finer; its main streets are more important; and there is nothing at Pompeii to compare with the magnificent arch of Trajan. But Pompeii is richer in minor matters, in all the illuminating incidents of private life; its chief interest lies in its wonderful houses, and in the almost miraculous preservation of much of their interior decoration. And their situations accord with their peculiarities. Timgad lies on a bare hill-side, far from the habitations of man; Pompeii hard by the lovely bay of Sorrento, in one of the fairest landscapes of Italy. The cities are not rivals; they supplement each other; and those of us to whom a study of what was before is one of the chief interests of life may be grateful that we have so much of both. _XII—THE ROAD THROUGH KHABYLIA_ Setif—The Chabet pass—A fishless river—A lovely coast—Bougie—Khabylia— Greek types—Fort National. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ “A rough laborious people, there, Not only give the dreadful Alps to smile, And press their culture on retiring snows, But, to firm order trained and patient war, They likewise know, beyond the nerve remiss Of mercenary force, how to defend The tasteful little their hard toil has earned.” THOMSON.