of Meknez, the terrible Sultan
Moulay-Ismael, used to carry off from beyond the Atlas and bring up in
his military camps to form the nucleus of the Black Guard which defended
his frontiers. We were on the line of travel between Meknez and the sea,
and it seemed not unlikely that these _nourwals_ were all that remained
of scattered outposts of Moulay-Ismael's legionaries.

After a time we left _oueds_ and villages behind us and were in the
mountains of the Rarb, toiling across a high sandy plateau. Far off a
fringe of vegetation showed promise of shade and water, and at last,
against a pale mass of olive-trees, we saw the sight which, at whatever
end of the world one comes upon it, wakes the same sense of awe: the
ruin of a Roman city.

Volubilis (called by the Arabs the Castle of the Pharaohs) is the only
considerable Roman colony so far discovered in Morocco. It stands on the
extreme ledge of a high plateau backed by the mountains of the Zerhoun.
Below the plateau, the land drops down precipitately to a narrow
river-valley green with orchards and gardens, and in the neck of the
valley, where the hills meet again, the conical white town of Moulay
Idriss, the Sacred City of Morocco, rises sharply against a wooded
background.

So the two dominations look at each other across the valley: one, the
lifeless Roman ruin, representing a system, an order, a social
conception that still run through all our modern ways, the other, the
untouched Moslem city, more dead and sucked back into an unintelligible
past than any broken architrave of Greece or Rome.

Volubilis seems to have had the extent and wealth of a great military
outpost, such as Timgad in Algeria; but in the seventeenth century it
was very nearly destroyed by Moulay-Ismael, the Sultan of the Black
Guard, who carried off its monuments piece-meal to build his new capital
of Meknez, that Mequinez of contemporary travellers which was held to be
one of the wonders of the age.

Little remains to Volubilis in the way of important monuments: only the
fragments of a basilica, part of an arch of triumph erected in honour of
Caracalla, and the fallen columns and architraves which strew the path
of Rome across the world. But its site is magnificent; and as the
excavation of the ruins was interrupted by the war it is possible that
subsequent search may bring forth other treasures comparable to the
beautiful bronze _sloughi_ (the African hound) which is now its
principal poss