d shadow travelled with the sun, to be diversified
with hill and dale, upland and hollow; while orange gardens, orchards,
olive and palm plantations held their appropriate sites on the slopes or
the bottoms. Through the mass of green, which extended still more thickly
from the west round to the north, might be seen at intervals two solid
causeways tracking their persevering course to the Mediterranean coast,
the one to the ancient rival of Rome, the other to Hippo Regius in
Numidia. Tourists might have complained of the absence of water from the
scene; but the native peasant would have explained to them that the eye
alone had reason to be discontented, and that the thick foliage and the
uneven surface did but conceal what mother earth with no niggard bounty
supplied. The Bagradas, issuing from the spurs of the Atlas, made up in
depth what it wanted in breadth of bed, and ploughed the rich and yielding
mould with its rapid stream, till, after passing Sicca in its way, it fell
into the sea near Carthage. It was but the largest of a multitude of
others, most of them tributaries to it, deepening as much as they
increased it. While channels had been cut from the larger rills for the
irrigation of the open land, brooks, which sprang up in the gravel which
lay against the hills, had been artificially banked with cut stones or
paved with pebbles; and where neither springs nor rivulets were to be
found, wells had been dug, sometimes to the vast depth of as much as 200
fathoms, with such effect that the spurting column of water had in some
instances drowned the zealous workmen who had been the first to reach it.
And, while such were the resources of less favoured localities or seasons,
profuse rains descended over the whole region for one half of the year,
and the thick summer dews compensated by night for the daily tribute
extorted by an African sun.

At various distances over the undulating surface, and through the woods,
were seen the villas and the hamlets of that happy land. It was an age
when the pride of architecture had been indulged to the full; edifices,
public and private, mansions and temples, ran off far away from each
market-town or borough, as from a centre, some of stone or marble, but
most of them of that composite of fine earth, rammed tight by means of
frames, for which the Saracens were afterwards famous, and of which
specimens remain to this day, as hard in surface, as sharp at the angles,
as when they first w