The desert was alien to Rome, as the sea was. The old trade from the Soudan which had been the staple of Leptis and which Carthage had certainly maintained, drooped and perhaps disappeared. Roman Africa turned to the Mediterranean and lived upon the commerce of its further shores. Along the edge of the Sahara a string of posts was held. Biskra was Roman, and El Kantara, and Gafsa. The doubt indeed is rather where the Romans did not penetrate, so tenacious were they in holding the southern boundary of Europe, the wall of the Atlas, against the wandering tribes of the sand. There is a fine story of a French commander who, having taken his column with great efforts through a defile where certainly men had never marched before, was proud, and sent a party to chisel the number of the regiment upon a smooth slab of rock above them, but when the men had reached it they saw in deep clear letters, cut long before, “The IIIrd Legion. The August. The Victorious.” [Sidenote: Verecunda] Of twenty startling resurrections of Rome which a man sees in less than twenty days on foot in any part of Algiers, consider this. Beyond Lamboesis, the frontier town of the Legionaries, with only a range of hills between it and the Sahara, there was a little town or village. It was quite small and a long way off from the city. It was of no importance; we have no record of it. Except that its name was Verecunda, we know nothing about it. One of its citizens, being grateful that he was born in his native place, thought he would give the little town or village a gate worthy of the love he bore it, and he built an arch all inspired with the weightiness of Rome. The little town has gone. There is not a single stone of it left. But as you come round a grove of trees in a lonely part, under the height of Aurès, you have before you this great thing, as though it were on the Campagna or carefully railed round in some very wealthy city. [Sidenote: The Great Arch] It is all alone. The wind blows through it off the mountains. Every winter the frost opens some new little crack, and every generation or so a stone falls. But in two thousand years not so much has been ruined by time, but that the impression of Rome remains: its height, its absoluteness, and its strength. And this example is but one of very many that a man might choose as he wandered up and down the high steppes and through the gorges of the hills. [Illustration] [Sidenote: The Berbers] As he so wanders, he is taken with a strong desire to grasp the whole place at one view as it stood just before the barbarians came, and to see what the Vandals saw: to look up the valley from the rock of Cirta with the temples on the edge of either precipice and to see the towns re-arise. There are men who have felt this desire in Italy, but in Africa it is a much stronger desire, and since Africa is strange and very empty, perhaps by watching long enough at night that desire might be fulfilled.