Asia, which had first sailed in by sea and had been destroyed, or rather obliterated, when Carthage fell, came in now from the desert; Asia was like an enemy who is driven out of one vantage, and then, after a breathing-space, makes entry by another. But in such a struggle the periods of success and failure are longer than those of sieges, and even than the lives of kingdoms. The Maghreb, our test of sovereignty, had admitted the Phœnician for some six or seven hundred years. It had been thoroughly welded into Rome for five hundred. The Vandals came, and did no more than any other wandering tribe: they stirred the final anarchy a little; they were at once absorbed. But the tenacity by which Gaul, Britain, Spain and the Rhine were to slough off the memories of decay and to attain their own civilisation again after the repose of the Dark Ages—that tenacity was not in the nature of Barbary. In the seventh and eighth centuries, when all the remainder of the west had fallen, when Italy was already taxed and half governed by a few Germans, when Gaul and Spain had at their heads small bands of mixed barbarian and Roman nobles, and when everything seemed gone to ruin, this southern shore of the Mediterranean was overwhelmed and, what is more, persuaded. There came riding upon it out of the desert continual lines of horsemen whom these horsemen of Numidia could mix with and understand. The newcomers wore the white wrapping of the south: all their ways were southern ways, suited to the intensity of the sun, and Barbary, or the main part of it, was southern and burning. Their eyes were very bright, and in their ornaments the half-tamed tribesmen recognised an old appetite for splendour. For all the effect of Rome perhaps one-third of the African provincials were still nomadic when the Arabs appeared, and that nomadic part was thickest towards the desert from which the invasion came; the invaders themselves were nomads, and even on the shore of the Maghreb, where men had abandoned the nomadic habit, the instinct of roving still lingered. Islam, therefore, when it first came in, tore up what Rome had planted as one tears up a European shrub planted in the friable soil of Africa. The Bedawin, as they rode, bore with them also a violent and simple creed. And here, again, a metaphor drawn from the rare vegetation of this province can alone define the character of their arrival. Their Faith was like some plant out of the solitudes; it was hard in surface; it was simple in form; it was fitted rather to endure than to grow. It was consonant with the waterless horizons and the blinding rocks from which it had sprung. Its victory was immediate. Before Charlemagne was born the whole fabric of our effort in Barbary, the traditions of St. Augustine and of Scipio, had utterly disappeared. No one from that time onwards could build a Roman arch of stone or drive a straight road from city to city or recite so much as the permanent axioms of the Roman Law.