A score of miles or so beyond Algiers, near the little village of Kolea, the west-bound traveler comes within sight of one of the most remarkable sepulchral monuments in North Africa—the Kubr-er-Rumia, “the grave of the Roman lady,” as the Arabs call it, though better known by its French name, Tombeau de la Chrétienne. A huge circular stone building, surmounted by a pyramid and supported by sixty Ionic columns, it stands on the summit of a hill, some little distance from the highway and seven hundred and fifty feet above the sea. To visit it one must do a little climbing, but, if you have any imagination in your soul, it is well worth the trouble, for it is the tomb of Juba II, who ruled in Mauretania during the latter part of the first century B.C., and—what is far more important to most of us—of his wife, the beautiful Selene, daughter of Mark Antony and of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. It is an interesting circumstance that in 1555, when Salah Reis, the pirate-pasha of Algiers, having use for the stones which form the mighty sepulcher, set men to tear it down, big black wasps came swarming from the burial-chambers within the tomb and stung the vandals to death. How that must have delighted the imperious and relentless spirit of Cleopatra! The Princess Selene presented an embarrassing problem to the government at Rome, for in her veins flowed the blood of the Ptolemies, the Cæsars, and possibly of the Pharaohs, and there were those who would have claimed for her the succession to the thrones of two great empires. So, in order to get rid of this potentially troublesome young person, the Emperor Augustus married her off to Juba II, a descendant of that Masinissa, king of Numidia, mentioned in an earlier chapter, who had been a stanch ally of the Romans in their conflict with Carthage. Crossing to Africa, the royal pair set about the creation of a capital on the site of the ancient Punic town of Jol, which they renamed Julia Cæsarea and which is to-day called Cherchel, seventy-five miles west of Algiers. Here, where the wooded hills come down to meet the curving bay, they raised a noble city, a seat of art and learning and a center of the best culture of the time. A theater, a hippodrome, palaces, temples, baths, and villas rose in gleaming marble upon the hill-slopes above the Mediterranean; and here, surrounded by artists, scientists, and philosophers, the daughter of Cleopatra lived with her student husband to a ripe old age, the two of them being buried, as I have already remarked, in the Kubr-er-Rumia, the splendid mausoleum near Kolea. The Arab invaders, the Algerine pirates, the French army engineers and archæologists, and the earthquakes have between them left little of the ancient city standing; but the museum at Cherchel contains some of the finest statues found in Africa, including the lower half of an Egyptian god in black basalt, bearing the cartouche of Thotmes I, which, according to some authorities, is an indication that