But the thing that appealed to me most in Timgad was an inscription cut deep into a stone set between two columns of the Forum: VENARI LAVARI LUDERE RIDERE OCCEST VIVERE TO HUNT TO BATHE TO PLAY TO LAUGH THAT IS TO LIVE The dour-minded have seized upon this pleasing little inscription to point a moral, to illustrate the laxity, the unworthy ideals which prevailed among the Romans during the empire’s decadence and decline. But to me it bespeaks a joyousness, a candid love of harmless pleasures which in this strenuous age, when mere wealth is the chief goal, is most refreshing. To most visitors, I suppose, Timgad is merely a picturesque and interesting ruin, but to my way of thinking it appeals less to the eye than to the imagination. It is a token of the dim and distant past. It brings to us across a chasm of close on two thousand years a message from a civilization not materially different from our own. It serves to remind us that the power and wealth and progress of which we are so prone to boast were to be found here on the edge of the desert when white man’s America was yet unborn; that the mighty nation which stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific had a parallel in another nation which stretched from the Sahara to Scotland. Yet Thamugas, be it remembered, was never a Roman city of the first rank. Its architectural splendors notwithstanding, it was but a border town. It stood on the very frontier of an empire whose greatness is vividly illustrated by the fact that Septimius Severus, during whose reign Thamugas attained its greatest prosperity, was born in Africa and died at York. Every traveler in India seeks so to time his visit to Agra that he may view the Taj Mahal by moonlight. The same should be done in the case of Timgad, and the visitor who does so will be richly repaid for his trouble—provided, of course, he has any imagination in his soul. Nor will he suffer any discomfort by doing so, for hard by the entrance to the ruins is a modest but well-kept hotel where he can obtain a clean and comfortable bed; or, if he prefers, he can dine there leisurely, spend the evening amid the ruins, and then motor back to Batna, which is but an hour away.