Hence we can wander back through narrow streets to the gate by which we entered, and near which stands the museum which is well worth a visit. In addition to all sorts of curiosities such as hair-pins, needles and implements for dentistry of the time, it contains some of the fine mosaics which have been unearthed from the houses and pieced together. If we look at them for a moment and imagine what they looked like up there near the capitol, we can get a small idea of how charming the residences must have been. There are also drawings of what it is supposed Timgad was like in the days of its glory, and certainly, if the artist was not carried away by his imagination— and there is no reason to suppose this—it must have been indeed a noble city. And yet its aspect now leaves the traveler with a feeling of sorrow. The silence is, first of all, appalling; the atmosphere of desolation is impossible to convey in words, and, as one sits in the forum or on the stone steps of the theater and tries to conjure up the gay figures who once frequented these now silent spaces, one is filled with an unspeakable awe. All this luxury, all this amusement, all these habitations—for what? For the future planned by Imperial Rome, since it is evident that no nation would have built the great town, with all in it, as a mere pastime. They intended to stay; they believed in their unshakable greatness; they believed in the power of the sword. But Rome fell, as had fallen other empires, and as others will also fall. And Timgad is left to the jackals and to the hyenas, to a few intelligent excavators, and to the host of chattering tourists who rush through these ruins of a glorious past without a thought for the cultured race who once lived there. “Vanity, vanity—all is vanity!” For this reason I have said as little as possible on this city of the dead, and I leave it to the traveler to go himself and feel the atmosphere which no painter or writer can reproduce. CHAPTER XXXIV DJEMILA THE DESOLATE If Roman ruins are of interest to the traveler there is a second edition of Timgad, to my mind finer and more complete than the subject of the last chapter, but unfortunately not on any main road. I refer to the town of Cuicul, now called Djemila, situated on the barren hills to the northeast of Sétif. There are two means of access: from Algiers via Sétif, or from Constantine via the road to Djidjelli, described in the next chapter.