The town has been taken in every conquest, and every conqueror has boasted himself to have overcome the walls of rock, the hundreds of feet of sheer climbing. The boast is manifestly absurd, though the temptation to make it was irresistible. When Cirta has been stormed only one gate admitted the invaders, and that was the isthmus which leads from the platform of the summit to the tableland beyond. It was here that Massinissa and here that the Romans entered. By this entry came the French soldiers, and the market which stands there is called to-day “The Place of the Breach.” [Sidenote: The Inscriptions] There is a place in Constantine where the full history of the town is best felt, and that is in the new Town Hall, which stands upon the edge of the rock upon the side furthest from the river and looks at the storms blowing over the uplands from Atlas and driving low clouds right at the crest of the walls. In this building are preserved (in no great number) the antiquities of the place and its neighbourhood. Here is a little silver victory which once fluttered, it is thought, in the hand of that great statue which adorned the Capitol, and here are long rows of tombs from the beginning of the Italian influence till the time of the martyrs: you see carved upon them the slow change of the mind until the last of the pagans boast of such virtues and have already that sort of content which the acceptation of the creed was to bequeath to succeeding time. This record of the epitaphs, though brief, is perfect; you watch at work in them the spirit that made St. Cyprian transforming the African soil; but their chief interest is in this, that they are, as it were, a rediscovery of ourselves. You dig through centuries of alien rubbish overlying the Roman dead, and, when you have dug deeply enough you come suddenly upon Europe. For twelve hundred years an idiom quite unfamiliar to us has alone been spoken here: beneath it you find the august and reasonable Latin, and as you read you feel about you the air of home. For all those generations the manifold aspect of the divine was forgotten: there were no shrines nor priests to rear them. Then, deep down, you discover a tablet upon a tomb, and, reading it, you find it was carved in memory of a priestess of Isis who was so gracious and who so served the divinities of the woods that when she died _ingemuerunt Dryades_: twice I read those delicate words, delicately chiselled in hard stone, and I saw her going in black, with her head bent, through groves. A trace of colouring remains upon the lettering of the verse and a powerful affection lingers in it, so that the past is preserved. Islam destroyed with fanaticism the figures of animals and of men: here in these European carvings they are everywhere. The barbarian creed conceived or implanted a barbaric fear of vines: here you see Bacchus, young, on the corner of a frieze, and gentle old Silenus carried heavily along.