* * * * * [Sidenote: Cæsarea or Cherchel] If it is from the Rock of Cirta, from Constantine, that the recovery of the province and its re-entry into Europe is best perceived—for there stands the unchanging centre of Africa, and there can all the threads of her destiny be grasped—yet there is another place far westward and down upon the shore, where the wound that Europe suffered by the Mohammedan invasion is more marked and long eclipse of our race more apparent. It is the Bay of Cæsarea. Constantine is so necessary to Africa that its very name (and it is alone in this among all the cities) has been preserved. Cæsarea has lost its name and its dignity too. The Barbarians have come to call her “Cherchel”: as for her rank, it has been forgotten altogether; yet this port was for a hundred years peculiar among all others in the Mediterranean—it was more remote, more splendid, and more new. The accident which created it lent a great story to its dynasty, and its situation here, along the steeper shores that lead on to the Straits and to the outer ocean, lent some western mystery to it and some appeal. [Sidenote: Cherchel] Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, was famous throughout the Mediterranean for her beauty. The last of her lovers—it is well known—was Anthony the Triumvir, who had desired (until he saw her) to inherit from Cæsar and to rule the whole world. This ambition he abandoned after one battle, lost, it is said, through her folly; and soon after that defeat they chose to die. But a fruit of their loves, and a picture, perhaps, of his courage and of her magnificence, survived in a daughter whom her mother had dedicated to the Moon and had called Selene. This child was married out into Barbary, to the king of the nomads, and here, in Cherchel, she held with her husband for many years a court which gathered round it the handicraft of Corinth, the letters of Athens, and some reflected splendour from the town of Rome. He was of those horsemen who had now for two centuries served Carthage as mercenaries or Rome as allies. To the cities of the sea coast, which were Italian or Asiatic in blood, these riders of the uplands had been outer men. They appeared barbaric to the end, and, at the very end, it was their blood, perhaps, that rebelled against the tradition of order and that joined first the Vandal and then the Arab. The king was dark and a barbarian. This wife who was sent to him inherited the broad forehead of Rome and the silence of Egypt, and was also an heiress to the generals of Alexander. There met in her, therefore, all those high sources from whose unison Christendom has proceeded. She came west to a new land that did not know cut stone and hardly roads: in a little time she had built a city.