Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/201

Rh Column of Trajan in light tunics, with lance and shield and mounted on small, fleet horses, charging the enemy.

As our Arab guide preceded us across a small ravine and along a narrow path that led to the nearest excavations, a flock of partridges rose from the bushes at our side and a hare crossed the path. Green and pink lizards scuttled over the marble slabs that were cut and placed by slaves seventeen centuries ago. In crevices of the flagstones and in cracks of the earth spiders and scolopendras waited for booty. One of them had attacked a great beetle in a green, shining armor, resembling the sacred Egyptian scarab, had killed it with its poison and was busy dragging it off to its hole.

We soon came to the walls of the town and found that the only remnants of them were scattered blocks of stone and the foundations of the round watch-towers and of some of the gates that led out of this distant Roman fortress on African soil. We entered this city, whose every bit of stone, every bit of pavement, every column had seen the symbol of "eternal" Rome. Involuntarily we felt a strange respect for this dead city, where, immortalized in these stones, lived the great spirit of the powerful nation that spread to the most distant corners of the world of those days rays of the civilization of all the peoples that went to make up the Empire. Today the strong lines of the triumphal arch erected to glorify Emperor Caracalla, the columns of the forum, ruins of the basilica—all places where the public life of the city once seethed—stand somber against the background of the brilliant sky. Also motionless and indifferent to the blaze of the sun's rays lay the treads of splendid staircases, the