4-19
I woke to a spectacular view. The old town of Constantine – the ancient center of Numidia, Jugurtha’s capital – lay directly opposite my balcony, across a valley crossed by an arcaded bridge and speckled with rusting satellite dishes. I met Rochdi in the lobby, and we drove out through Constantine. Towards the center, most of the buildings were uniform Soviet-style tower blocks (from the socialist era after independence). The buildings farther out were less tidy, their cinder block walls rising to bouquets of rusty rebar. Algerians, Rochdi said, are village people at heart; families like to live together, each generation building new stories on top of their parents’ homes. “But when the parents die, all the children fight about who gets to live downstairs.”
It was Friday, the first day of the Algerian weekend, and the roads were quiet. Ranges of stony hills rolled away on either side, but the valleys were filled with all the lushness of spring. Rochdi talked about tourism in Algeria; “the country has oil money, so tourists don’t matter.” Most tourists, he said, are French, usually former settlers or their descendants. The Spanish came too, to see where Cervantes was imprisoned. Italians came for the ruins.
Not even the most dedicated Italian tourists, however, had ever come to Hammam Essalahine, our first destination. I had read about the place years before – the only substantial Roman bath, of all the thousands scattered across the empire, still in operation today. I had seen pictures of the ancient pools, still filled with turquoise water. I was determined to film there.
Rochdi had never visited, but he had called the caretaker and confirmed that I would be able to record a video. After being stopped at a police checkpoint set up to regulate a local soccer match (the officers were incredulous when they heard why we had come), we followed a bumpy one-lane road into a village sprawled across a steep green slope. There we found a dusty parking lot that smelled faintly of sulfur. The baths lay at the far end, beyond a cast iron gate.
A surprised guard admitted us. At the entrance, a sign in Arabic informed visitors that the baths dated to the reigns of Titus and Vespasian, and that they had been restored to their current state by the local colonial governor in 1936. The placard went on to describe the mineral content and health benefits of the waters, which are evidently capable of relieving both rheumatism and leprosy. The buildings near the entrance dated to the twentieth-century restoration, and featured a series of rooms for individual and group bathing. Behind them, the guard showed us the hot spring that fed the entire complex, coursing down from the hills. A cool breeze swept clouds of steam over the walkway.
Then, at last, we entered the ancient part of the baths. The two ancient pools were full of bathers – perhaps three dozen men and boys lounging and splashing. (The women’s baths are in the modern section.) When I entered fully-clothed, camera in hand, somebody asked Rochdi who I was. He told them, and word spread that an American YouTuber was visiting the baths. All at once, I was a celebrity. People gave me the peace sign, shouted “welcome to Algeria,” and did cannonballs for the camera. I was encouraged to hop in.
A man swam up and asked where I was from. When I told him, he nodded once. “I used to chat online with a woman from Chicago. Then I changed my ideas…” He stroked his long Islamic beard. The manager, a man named Nabil, appeared, and explained in French that the baths were named for the saints who were said to have conferred healing properties on the water. I took a selfie with the guard. As I was leaving, a boy ran up and asked for the name of my YouTube channel.
Onward, then, to Timgad, the Pompeii of Africa. We started in the old-fashioned museum, where mosaics – mostly late antique – covered every wall. They showed the usual subjects: heroes, hippocampi, Hermaphroditus. By far the most impressive mosaic, propped against the wall of a secondary room, showed nereids swimming with exotic sea monsters. The tiny, brilliant tesserae were set with painterly skill. This mosaic had been found at nearby Lambaesis, and brought here from that site’s tiny and slowly collapsing museum.
The Timgad Museum itself was in need of work, its plaster walls seamed with finger-wide cracks. Back in the brilliant sun, we surveyed the hundreds of votive stele, almost all dedicated to Baal-Saturn, stacked against the museum walls. Then we continued to the site.
I had been reading about the ruins of Timgad for weeks. The core of the city, founded as a military colony in the reign of Trajan, was planned with military precision, its streets describing a tidy grid around the central forum. Over the centuries, new districts grew up, sprawling in every direction from the original walls. The site was bigger than I had expected, and there was more to it than I had anticipated – vastly more.
The spring flowers that blanked the site were part of the magic. So was the fact that, with the exception of a small Italian tour group, all the visitors were locals. Most were families with young children, to whom I became an object of curiosity. A boy of about eight approached me shyly, said “hey, bro!” In English, then ran off.
With Rochdi in tow, I visited every corner of the site, breaking for lunch at the Trajan Hotel just outside the site entrance. (Our tickets, which cost the equivalent of about a dollar, were good for the entire day.) Late in the afternoon, we crashed through knee-high grass to the Donatist quarter, where the tomb of a bishop-saint still jutted from the weeds. I stuck my gimbal over the iron door of the baptistery to see the perfectly-preserved mosaics within.
As twilight fell, we reached the Byzantine fort, a large sixth-century castle built by Justinian’s general Solomon (the dedicatory inscription can still be seen beside the gate). The walls, still up to 50 feet tall, are collapsing, and the fort is technically closed to visitors. But we went inside – or rather, I did. As we entered, Rochdi saw a feral dog vanishing into the tall grass. “Maybe that dog is a coward” he said, “and maybe it isn’t. I don’t want to find out.”
So as Rochdi watched from a prudent perch atop a broken staircase, I made a slow circuit of the crumbling fortress. The sun was setting, casting half of the castle into shadow and bathing the rest in a crimson glow. The drone of bees, feasting on spring flowers, filled the air. As I wandered through a row of collapsed barracks, I caught sight of the moon, already bright.
The ride back to Constantine took two hours. The hills faded into sunset, and only the road remained visible, a gray strip running off into the dark. I briefly fell asleep, but was jostled awake by a succession of potholes. As we approached the city, we encountered a line of parked cars. After a moment, a policeman ushered us forward. A man lay dead on the side of the road, covered by a white sheet. Around him and his broken motorcycle, a circle of bystanders stood. In the front seat, Rochdi shook his head. “It happens too often here.”
4-20
At about 9:30, in the cool morning sunshine, a white 15-seat van pulled up to my hotel. Rochdi opened the sliding door and I hopped in. After meeting the driver who would be with us for the rest of the week (a genial man whose nickname sounded like “boozy”), I was introduced to Jerry Sorkin and to the guests who would be joining us on the trip.
There were only four, giving us a rather skewed guide-to-visitor ratio. The guests were an interesting group. Mary, 84 years young, was a longtime state department employee who had served as America’s first ambassador to Moldova. Philip, an Australian, had been digging at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall when he heard about the Algerian trip. Louinn, born in the Philippines but a longtime resident of Los Angeles, was a former journalist. Isaiah, a scientist employed by Indiana University, was the only guest close to my age.
With this intrepid band, we set out through the frenzied traffic to explore Constantine. We started with the city museum, which was – like almost every other museum in Algeria – a relic of French colonial rule. Though rather disorganized and completely unlabeled, the collection was remarkably rich. Stele with Punic inscriptions were stacked three deep around one room. Fine mosaics from local villas shone dully on the walls and floor. Perhaps the most remarkable artifact was a perfect statuette of victory, once poised in the hand of a colossal cult statue of Jupiter.
Constantine, built over jutting mesas and plunging valleys, is a city of bridges. The oldest still in use today date to the colonial period. Their Roman predecessors have virtually disappeared. So, with the exception of a short section of aqueduct, has the rest of the ancient city. There was, however, a spectacular Roman-style triumphal arch, built to commemorate the local contribution to the First World War. As we took our photos here, Philip – who was sporting a fedora and scarf – was mistaken for a movie star, and recruited into a series of selfies.
Jerry, whom I had never met in person, was obviously sick. It was written in how he stood and walked, in the fatigue on his face and the sores on his arms. When I asked how he was feeling, he revealed that he was battling two cancers, one of which had recently metastasized. He was uncertain whether he would have the stamina to complete the trip.
But he gamely kept up with us as we made our way across Constantine. A century-old iron bridge carried us across a deep ravine, where a frothing river plunged through a natural tunnel in the rock. (Philip, a great enthusiast for Roman hydraulic architecture, was thrilled to see the arcades of an aqueduct far below.) On the other side was the old city of Constantine, still dominated by a decaying barracks complex from the colonial days. Many of the buildings along our path were also colonial relics; Jerry was especially interested in an abandoned synagogue with a Moorish Revival façade. Although there were few cars, weekend crowds filled the streets. Vendors hawked, shoppers shuffled.
After spending an hour in the Palace of Ahmed Bey, an orientalist fantasy shadowed by huge trees, the van brought us to a suburban restaurant. There we encountered the “other” Algerian archaeological tour group. It was superior to ours in every way. It had 20 members compared to our four, a sleek white bus that dwarfed our van, and was led by Philip Kendrick, Algeria’s most distinguished archaeological guide. I introduced myself, and told him that I had his guidebook in my backpack. To my surprise, I found my friend Gareth Harney among the guests. When he asked me how my trip was going, I half-consciously shifted to block the view of the single small table where the group was sitting. “So far, so good…”
After lunch, we drove an hour or so to our first Roman site: Tiddis, ancient Castellum Tidditanorum. I had read about the site – a small Roman fort that gradually developed into an insignificant town – and was prepared to be unimpressed. But when we stepped from the van, we found ourselves in a breathtaking landscape of green valleys and sun-splashed ridges. Ahead, a monumental arch seemed to grow from the stones of the hills. Rochdi looked on with a proprietary air. “This,” he said, “is my favorite site.”
The ruins of the city, through well-preserved, reflected its limited resources. The forum was no larger than the courtyard of many Roman mansions, and the main church – directly across the street from a prominent Mithraeum – would have fit comfortably into a single aisle of one of Rome’s late antique basilicas. Compact houses, built in the opus Africanum style with stone posts and rubble fill, clung to the slopes above and below.
But the grandeur of the landscape more than compensated for the meagerness of the ruins. The hills seemed to go on forever, summit after summit, to the distant white buildings of Constantine. Isaiah, who had never been to a Roman site, was especially thrilled, taking pictures with an enthusiasm that flooded his camera’s memory card by the third day of the trip. As we climbed higher, we were accompanied by the site’s elderly caretaker, whose father had held the same post before him. While Rochdi ran back to the van to get a coat, the caretaker addressed me in gravelly French, and showed me an inscription where the name of Geta, Caracalla’s brother, had been chiseled away after his murder.
An even more interesting inscription stood in the center of the miniscule forum. It honored Quintus Lollius Urbicus, the son of a local landowner, who had risen by luck and talent to become governor of Britain (he began the Antonine Wall) and finally urban prefect of Rome itself. At no other period in history, as more than one scholar has remarked, could a Berber from a backwater Algerian town have achieved such astonishing success. After clambering up to the cisterns that fed the baths, we walked back down toward the gate. The sun was setting, dyeing the hillsides gold and crimson against a paling sky.
4-21
On the long drive from Constantine to Djemila, with perhaps more honesty than discretion, Rochdi summarized Algeria’s stormy recent history. After the brutal war of independence (one of his uncles had been shot in the back three times; he survived, and “never stops talking about it”). After the Soviet-style stagnation of the seventies and eighties had come the horrors of the nineties, Algeria’s Black Decade, when Islamists attempted to take over the country. “They would stop buses like this one,” Rochdi said, “and ask every passenger to recite a passage from the Koran. If they could not, they were killed like sheep.” He drew a finger across his throat. President Bouteflika had brokered a truce, but at the cost of more stagnation, especially after he was incapacitated by a stroke during his third term. “And now,” Rochdi concluded, “there are new elections coming, which are very important…” As we neared the site, conversation turned to more prosaic topics, from the price of gas (less than a dollar a gallon) to the intricacies of the official and unofficial exchange rates.
Then, we were in Djemila. Although an untidy town has grown up along the road leading to the site over the past twenty years, the ruins themselves have changed little since they were excavated by the French a century ago. Nor has the museum, whose walls are crowded with dozens of mosaics, some visibly buckling. Although the quality of execution was not uniformly high, there were a number of remarkable pieces. One vast floor featured dozens of animals in roundels of vines, with the cryptic message “Asinus Nika” (victory to the ass) next to an image of a donkey. This inscription, repeated on another mosaic, is thought to have been an anti-Christian slogan. Another mosaic showed the myth of Hero and Leander. Looking on, Philip remarked that he had once swam across the Hellespont himself. The current, he said, was quite strong.
After lunch at the only restaurant in town (which served remarkably good lentil soup), we entered the site. Djemila was the twin of Timgad, a military colony founded around the beginning of the second century in a fertile but remote place. Like Timgad, the town flourished, reaching its apogee in the early third century. Its population, however, probably never reached 10,000; and the city faded back into the hills after the Arab conquest.
We began in the Christian quarter, where weeds were growing up through the mosaic pavements of the basilicas. From the crest of the adjacent hill, we were treated to the iconic view of the site, framed by the gray massiveness of the Severan temple in the foreground and the blue hills behind.
We moved at a leisurely pace. In the basilica, which featured a dramatic raised tribunal, I found an excuse to discourse about my dissertation research on Roman places of power. We sat on the cool stone seats of the theater, then walked along the cardo, wildflowers – yellow, blue, and red – nodding beneath the columns. We scrambled through the vast ruins of the House of Europa, with its private bath and subterranean chambers.
At the end of our visit, I spent an hour taking footage for a video on the site. Moving as quickly as I could, I worked through all the major monuments, concluding with the House of Bacchus, where I waded through thigh-deep wildflowers and fragrant grass in the ruins of the great dining room. By the time we left, night was welling up from the valleys between the coppery hills.
4-22
On the long drive from Constantine, as we drove past the burnished mirror of a salt lake, Rochdi described how he had avoided Algeria’s military service requirement by being slightly double-jointed. He also spoke about the best way to kill a sheep for Eid al-Adha (he admitted, however, that he didn’t care for blood himself, and had only theoretical knowledge of the topic). Mary told a story about how she had once battled a monkey for a bag of chocolate chip cookies in central Africa.
And so we came to the Medrecen, a vast circular monument – probably built in the third century BC – that marks the tomb of a Numidian chieftain. The architecture was strikingly eclectic, borrowing from Greece, Egypt, and possibly even Persia – a reflection, perhaps, of the vanished public monuments of Carthage.
After a pit stop at a gas station (where a man was selling roast corn next to the prayer hall / bathroom), we continued to Lambaesis, longtime base of the third legion. This was the only Roman legion in Africa, responsible for policing a border that extended from the Atlantic to the Nile. The nerve center of the legion was its vast stone fortress. Well-preserved until the nineteenth century, it was systematically demolished by the French to build the prison that still covers part of the site. Only the so-called Groma, the monumental vestibule of the headquarters complex, still stands to its original height.
I recorded a short video in the Groma, where storks were nesting on the brackets of the long-vanished roof, and explored the trash-strewn principia and baths behind. Then I hurried to rejoin the group in the amphitheater outside the camp walls. Although the seats and other dressed stone had been stripped by the French, the rubble core of the structure was intact. So, remarkably, were the passages beneath the arena, where I cracked my head on a low lintel while filming. We walked back to the van through fields of lavender, broken pottery and square-headed Roman nails ridging the path underfoot.
Then, back to Timgad. After a late lunch at the Trajan Hotel restaurant, we continued to the site. The afternoon was beautiful and clear. As the sun settled toward the western hills, I worked my way across the site, periodically leaving the group to film some monument or street. We reconvened at the Capitolium, dramatically backlit in the evening light, for a few photos beside the tumbled Corinthian capitals of the temple. Then we walked to the Temple of the Genius of the Colony, where we climbed the tall podium.
The sun was close to setting, and the gray ruins had caught the blush of its glancing rays. The Capitolium loomed in the middle distance, tall as a cathedral. To our left, beyond the glowing Arch of Trajan, a full moon was rising. None of us spoke much. Something about the spectacle called for silence.
Returning to the van in twilight, we found ourselves saddled a police escort. Since the Black Decade, foreign tourist groups have been required to have a security detail. In practice, this does little besides slow the progress of any long drive, since Algerian police can only work inside their districts, and thus have to pass on their charges, like a relay baton, at every regional border. Rochdi was frustrated by their presence. “They are only with us because they are bored. Police in villages have nothing to do.” We had no choice, however, but to follow the lights of our escort all the way to Batna. On the way, to pass the time, Rochdi explained how the Algerian business community evaded Islam’s prohibition on interest.