The lapse of time brought no ease. There was something in the temper of Asia that was intolerable to the western people. They saw it always ready to give way and then to turn and strike. They detested its jealous and unhappy rites. Its face was hateful and seemed dangerous to them. The two great struggles, at the close of which Rome destroyed as one destroys a viper, were conducted against members of the same family, Carthage and Jerusalem. A pretext was chosen: Carthage was abject, yielded three hundred hostages, and even all her arms. Only the matter of her religion moved her and the order to remove the site of the town. To this Carthage opposed a frenzy which delayed for three years the capture of the city; but when it was taken it was utterly destroyed. Every stone was removed, the land was left level, and suddenly, within a very few years of that catastrophe, every influence of Carthage disappeared. It was in this way that the first great power of the Orient upon the Maghreb was extinguished. This final act of Rome was accomplished within a hundred and fifty years of the Nativity. The life of a man went by, and little more was done. It was close upon our era before the Roman habit took root in Africa, a century more before the Maghreb was held with any complete organisation. By the middle of the fifth century the Vandals had come in to ruin it. [Sidenote: The Roman Monuments] There were, therefore, but little more than three hundred years during which Rome was to bring up this land into the general unity of Western Europe. There is no other portion of the world Rome governed, not even Southern Gaul, where her genius is more apparent. In that short interval of daylight—a tenth of the known history of the Maghreb—Rome did more than had Carthage in seven hundred years and more than was Islam to do in seven hundred more. [Illustration] It is indeed the peculiar mark of Barbary, which makes it a scene of travel different from all others, that everywhere the huge monuments of Rome stand out in complete desertion. If civilisation had been continuous here as it has been in nearly every city of Europe, Africa would not move one in this fashion. Or if a race, active and laborious, had quarried these stones to build new towns, their aspect would be more familiar, because in Europe we are accustomed to such decay and it helps us to forget the vast foundation of Rome. But to find it here, sometimes in the desert, nearly always in a solitude; to round a sandy hill without trees or men and to come, beyond a dry watercourse, upon these enormous evidences of our forerunners and their energy, is an impression Europe cannot give. [Sidenote: The Ampitheatre]