大象传媒

I had been in Algeria for many months but had seen little of the country. Some 'duty-rips' towards the west had whetted my curiosity. The first had enabled me to visit the so-called' Tombeau de la Chretienne' a first-century stone, bee-hive shaped mausoleum built for one of Rome's client-kings. A discovery which affected me profoundly was Tipasa, site of a half-excavated Roman town. I wrote home to my wife Minna: ' The archaeologists had traced the course of the walls and about three courses of stones still stood. I passed through an obviously reconstructed arch which led into a wilderness of tumbled walls and broken columns.

'The town extended across a hill, half amid woodlands and extending to the sea. It was a magnificent site, far superior to that chosen for the nondescript modern village nearby. From this height I could see clear across a wide bay, flanked on the west by a headland so high that the clouds obscured its summit. As I stood there I fancied I could recreate the scene of seventeen hundred years ago, raise those broken walls, complete those shattered pillars, fill the weed-covered and barely discernable streets with flowing life. It was not a big town - a provincial place that must have seemed small beer to a traveller from Rome or Byzantium. It flourished in Hadrian's time: I discovered his name inscribed on a block of stone

'There was a Christian basilica in the ruined nave of which small Arab boys watched over greedy goats. There were bath-houses which would have done credit to a modern city four times the size of this one. There was a little theatre, mostly un-excavated. I stood, absorbing it all, wishing for a whole day to enjoy it and reflecting, a little sardonically, upon what might remain of Lewisham, my birth-place, to astonish - or appal - after a similar passage of time. Much of Lewisham was already a mass of bombed-out ruins. Strange and emotional to walk in this deserted place where thousands of people had once lived, loved and died. Some had lived in the days when the shadow of the Vandals hung across North Africa as the shadow of latter-day Goths now hung over Britain. How often must these people have looked out to sea with fear or shivered when despatch riders came clattering down the streets.

'So times do not greatly change. All those people are gone, swept into the vast litter-bin of Time - their battles, their heroism or cowardice not even a memory unless in their writings and their art, though in this part of the world both are poor enough. But this must have been a beautiful place in those days with the neat villas nestling amid the olive trees (traces of mosaic flooring were still visible) and the Corinthian columns of the Forum rising above all. Close by the sea traces of the harbour remained and extended under water for some distance. I was sitting there when I met another soldier and we talked for a while - the commonplaces that soldiers talk. But afterwards it occurred to me that those commonplace words - rations, accommodation, yearning for home - might well have been spoken on the same spot by a couple of legionaries hailing, perhaps, from Britain. The two of us might have been our own ghosts returning after centuries to our place of exile. It was a place for dreaming. But now I grow fanciful. Extend your tolerance to me. Imagine what reams I shall write if ever I go east to the really big places.'

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