Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/204

188 it was a cemetery of that ancient Roman culture which had assimilated the thought, the arts and the imagination of the whole known world. Bronze statues of a barking dog, of Hercules, Neptune, Mercury and Isis, together with fragments of marble statues, coins, lamps, amphorae, jewels and mosaics were excavated from this cemetery and placed in the museum; but these objects, set up in a modern European building with catalogue numbers and labels, live no more and whisper no more to the musing traveler, as do the stones, the tablets and the columns of the ancient buildings left in their original settings.

And for what do these whisperings seek a sympathetic ear? Of what would they tell us? From far back in the canyon of Time, as ever-diminishing reverberations along the walls of the centuries, come down to us the quavering notes of military trumpets, the bustle and hum of the forum to which the mixed cohorts with their scores of tongues are returning after a victory over Edemon, the Moorish chieftain who has dared to defy Imperial Rome. Like the sounds of a distant storm one hears the cries of the soldiery and the populace, hailing Septimius Severus on his arrival at Volubilis, followed by the lower and calmer tones of the well-known prefect of the respected Caecilia gens, eloquently welcoming the noted dignitary. Is it the wind murmuring through the dry grass and the shrubs or is it the thousand-throated question of the crowd to the decemvir whom they have awaited as the messenger of the divine Claudius to announce to them whether he has acceded to their petition that their olive-skinned, brown and even black belovèd ones be