A man of northern Europe looking at this thing from the high road cannot but think it Jacobean (if he is English) or (if he is German or French) a thing of the Thirty Years’ War. It might be later perhaps, the freak of some Highland landlord or the relic of some local rebellion. It is older than our language by far, and almost older than the Faith. As one looks at it one cannot feel but only know its age, and one watches it up an avenue of stones wondering why it stands so lonely. But one’s wonder has no stuff in it till one goes on half a mile and more: by the roadside is a pile of Roman stones. These also stood in Lamboesis. Then, feeling himself yet within the walls of an unseen city, a man looks back over the stretch he has come and is appalled. In such a gaze you look westward towards the light beyond the mountains. The valley is already dark. The high road which the French have made glistens as hard as stone under the last light. Trees are still visible, especially the few mournful and hard pyramids of the cypress, but the little village, the modern prison (for there is a prison), and the rare labourers here and there are muffled up in twilight; and there lies before one a mere emptiness, beyond which, a long way off, dwindled to quite little, is the Praetorian Tower. A sharp memory of childhood from beyond years of common experience so strikes the mind. The spread plain with its one central tower seems infinite; it is now without hedges or trees or roofs or men; but once the Legion had filled up everything. [Sidenote: The Driver Passes] It was all quite bare as I surveyed it—more bare than a heath or a down, and as large as any landscape you may know. While I was watching this empty space, and surmising what contrast it would make with the famous and crowded ruins of Timgad to which this Lamboesis had been a neighbouring city, as Chichester is to Arundel—or, better still, as Portsmouth and its armament is to Southampton and its trade—I heard the rumble of heavy and fast wheels, and a man driving a coach passed me and then pulled up at my hail. He was the same man who had refused my bargain an hour and more before. He was driving the night coach to Tebessa. Not understanding men, he raised his price. I told him that I would pay him only what I had offered at Batna, _less_ the price of the miles I had gone. He would not yield, but he did these three things: first, he promised to send word, as he passed, to an old Soldier who kept a house near Timgad that a traveller was on the road; secondly, he gave me advice, telling me that I should freeze to death by night in that valley (for it was growing cold and the weather would not hold under such a sky); thirdly, he informed me of the exact distance, which was at the thirty-second stone, where there is a branch road to the right, leading in half an hour up the slopes of the range to Timgad. Then he drove on, and I spent what was left of a doubtful light in pressing onwards.