This nameless character which is the mark of the Empire, and carries, as it were, a hint of resurrection in it, is as strong in what has fallen as in what stands. A few bricks built at random into a mud wall bear the sign of Rome and proclaim her title: a little bronze unearthed at random in the rubbish heaps of the Rummel is a Roman Victory: a few flag-stones lying broken upon a deserted path in the woodlands is a Roman Road: nor do any of these fragments suggest the passing of an irrecoverable good, but rather its continued victory. To see so many witnesses small and great is not to remember a past or a lost excellence, but to become part of it and to be conscious of Rome all about one to-day. It is a surety also for the future to see such things. [Illustration] [Sidenote: The Peasant’s Wall] There is a field where this perpetuity and this escape from Time refresh the traveller with peculiar power. It is a field of grass in the uplands across which the wind blows with vigour towards distant hills. Here a peasant of the place (no one knows when, but long ago) fenced in his land with Roman stones. The decay of Islam had left him aimless, like all his peers. He could not build or design. He could not cut stone or mould brick. When he was compelled to enclose his pasture, the only material he could use was the work of the old masters who had trained his fathers but whom he had utterly forgotten or remembered only in the vague name of “Roum.” It was long before the reconquest that he laboriously raised that wall. Some shadow of Turkish power still ruled him from Constantine. No one yet had crossed the sea from Europe to make good mortar or to saw in the quarries again. It is with a lively appreciation that one notes how all he did is perishing or has perished. The poor binding he put in has crumbled. The slabs slope here and there. But the edges of those stones, which are twenty times older than his effort, remain. They will fall again and lie where he found them; but they and the power that cut them are alike imperishable. [Sidenote: The Landscape of Antiquity] It has been said that the men of antiquity had no regard for landscape, and that those principal poems upon which all letters repose betray an indifference to horizons and to distant views. The objection is ill-found, for even the poems let show through their admirable restraint the same passion which we feel for hills, and especially for the hills of home: they speak also of land-falls and of returning exiles, and an Homeric man desired, as he journeyed, to see far off the smoke rising from his own fields and after that to die. But much stronger than anything their careful verse can give us of this appetite for locality is the emplacement of their buildings. [Sidenote: The Theatre of Calama]