A few miles more, across a bleak and treeless plain waist-high in ripening grain, and Timgad comes in view. A whole hillside is thickly strewn with the white bones of the city, which was built in the reign of Trajan, during the first quarter of the second century by the soldiers of the Third Legion, then stationed at Tebessa. From the inscriptions found in the Forum, Colonia Marciana Trajana Thamugas, as it was called, appears to have been founded thirty-six years after Rome burned to the strains of Nero’s fiddle and to have been completed in seventeen years. With the lesson of the great fire fresh in their minds, and with a determination to avoid such disastrous conflagrations, its architects built with almost unnecessary solidity, and, as a further precaution, saw to it that all the more important buildings should have a clear space all around them. Never very large, the town was yet of great importance strategically, having been garrisoned by the Thirtieth Ulpian Legion, composed of veterans who had served in Trajan’s campaigns against the Parthians. Though Timgad has frequently been compared to Pompeii, which had been destroyed two decades before the other was begun, the two had as little in common as Palm Beach and Omaha. One was a lath and plaster city of pleasure; the other was a substantially built frontier town devoted to military purposes and to trade. While, like all Romans, the sturdy colonists who formed the population of Thamugas demanded a certain measure of magnificence, they could not be expected to rival the rich and luxury-loving Pompeians. Consequently, the statues which have been unearthed are not of the highest order, and the little museum contains few of the exquisite bronzes, pieces of jewelry, and frescos such as have been found in the ruins on the slopes of Vesuvius, but the excavators have laid bare some of the finest mosaics in existence, many of them in a perfect state of preservation.