Ancient Theveste was much larger than the present town, the French Tebessa. This, even reduced to the perimeter of the Byzantine fortress built under Justinian, still surprises the traveller by its singularly original aspect. Amid the wide plains of alfa-grass which surround it, with its quadrangular enclosure, its roads on the projection of the walls behind the battlements, its squat turrets, it has a look as archaic, as strange, as our own Aigues-Mortes amid its marshy fen. Nothing can be more rich and joyous to the eye than the rust which covers its ruins--a complete gilding that one would say had been laid on by the hand of man. It has a little temple which is a wonder and has been compared to the ancient Roman temple--the _Maison Carrée_--at Nîmes. But how much warmer, more living are the stones! The shafts of the columns, and the pilasters of the peristyle, barked by time, seem as scaly and full of sap as the trunks of palm-trees. The carved acanthus-leaves in the capitals of the pillars droop like bunches of palms reddened by the summer. Quite near, at the end of a narrow street, lined with modern and squalid hovels, the triumphal arch of Septimus Severus and of Caracalla extends its luminous bow; and high above the heavy mass of architecture, resting upon slim aerial little columns, a buoyant _ædiculus_ shines like a coral tabernacle or a coffer of yellow ivory. All about, forms in long draperies are huddled. The Numidian burnous has the whiteness of the toga. It has also the same graceful folds. At the sight of them you suddenly feel yourself to be in a strange land--carried back very far across the centuries. No sooner is the vision of antiquity outlined than it grows firm. Down below there, a horseman, clad in white, is framed with his white horse in the moulded cincture of a door. He passes, and upon the white wall of the near tower his shadow rests a moment, like a bas-relief upon the marble of a frieze. Beyond the Byzantine enclosure, the basilica, with its minor buildings, forms another town almost as large as the present Theveste, and also closed in by a belt of towers and ramparts. One is immediately struck by the opulent colour of the stones--rose, grown pale and thinner in the sun; and next, by the solid workmanship and the structural finish. The stones, as in the Greek temples, are placed on top of one another in regular layers: the whole holds together by the weight of the blocks and the polish of the surfaces.