On the edge of the Sahara, in the very south of Tunis, where the salt of the waste is already upon one, there stands an arena of appalling size. It is smaller, but only a little smaller, than the Coliseum: it seems, in the silence and the glare, far larger. The Romans built it in their decline. You might as you watch it be in Rome or in Nîmes or in Arles, but you look around you and see the plain, and then the ruin grows fantastically broad and strong. Mountains are greatest when one wakes at morning and sees them unexpectedly after a long night journey; when the last sight one had by sunset was of low hills and meadows. So it is with these ruins in Africa. The silence and the loneliness frame them. They are sudden, and when they have once been seen, especially by a man who wanders in that country on foot and does not know what marvel he may not find at the next turn of the path, they never afterwards leave the mind. [Sidenote: The Roman Planting of Trees and Towns] The things Rome did in Barbary were these: Of agriculture, which had been exceptional, despised by the cavalry of the mountains and confined to the little plains at the heads of the harbour-bays, she made a noble and, while she ruled, a permanent thing. Indeed it is one of the tests of the return of Europe to her own in the Maghreb that with the advance of our race, corn and vineyards advance, and with our retreat they recede. Rome planted trees which brought and stored rain. She most elaborately canalised and used the insufficient water of the high plateaux. She established a system of great roads. Where Carthage had produced the congestion of a few commercial centres, Rome spread out everywhere small flourishing and happy towns; a whole string of them along the coast in every bay from the Hippos to Tangier. There is, perhaps, not one of the little harbours backed up against the spurs of the Atlas, each in its bay, that has not a Roman market-place beneath its own. Here, as throughout the west, the civilisation of Rome was easy and desired, for it was in her temper to be of a conquering simplicity and in her chronicles she openly confessed her sins. The same unity which moulded Gaul was felt in Africa. The Roman arch and brick and column, the Roman road—all of one certain type—are as plain throughout the Maghreb as a thousand miles away in Treves or Rheims. [Sidenote: The Legionaries]