Of all the monuments of this departed glory, the most impressive, the most astounding, is the amphitheater at Thysdrus, or, to give it its Arab name, El Djem. Set in a solitude of orange sand, where the Sahel runs out in the Sahara, it is one of the most remarkable structures that I have ever seen. It rises from a shallow, saucer-like depression in the plain, as grandly as the pyramids at Gizeh, as abruptly as the walls of the Grand Cañon. As we topped a rise in the road we could see its towering, rose-brown walls, honeycombed with arches, twenty kilometers away. From a distance it is profoundly imposing; close at hand it is positively overwhelming. The grandest Roman monument in all Africa, it is perhaps the best preserved building of its kind in the world, scarcely inferior to the Colosseum at Rome. There is nothing to compare with it in the monumental architecture of modern times. It is so large that it completely conceals the native town which lies behind it. Though used by the Arabs for centuries as a quarry, it was so colossal, so strongly built, as to defy their attempts at destruction. The achievement of building it is the more astounding when one realizes that the stones used in this mountain of masonry were hauled by gangs of slaves and teams of elephants and yokes of oxen, over roads specially constructed for the purpose, from quarries twenty miles away. The mere sight of that tremendous structure, rising solitary, majestic, and time-defying from the lonely plain, does more than all the histories ever written to impress one with the might of Rome. Of Thysdrus, the splendid city which once stood upon the site of El Djem and which gave to Rome three emperors named Gordian, nothing remains save the amphitheater and some stones and marbles built into the wretched native dwellings. The construction of the amphitheater is attributed to Gordian the Elder, who sat on the imperial throne in the first half of the third century A.D. During the blood-stained years which followed its erection its arena was the scene of the torture and martyrdom of thousands of Christians; the dungeons in which the condemned were confined and the dens of the wild beasts may still be seen.