I went there on a day of hot sunshine and an intense blue sky. It is about ten miles from Tunis. As the train crawled like a caterpillar along the thread of embankment across the lagoon, an Italian steamer was gliding through the canal on my right; and beyond the pencilled edge of the lake was the deep blue rim of sea for which she was bound. On my left was the placid surface of the lake, dotted with waterfowl and with a few wooden stakes here and there, on which crouched the black figures of cormorants looking like dejected priests. On a tiny island were the ruins of a Spanish fort. Reaching Goulette, there were still a few small stations to pass, and then came Carthage.
The sandy soil seemed almost to throb in the warmth, hedges of cactus lined the broad road from the tiny station. Absurd modern villas stood about, flotsam of the new civilisation. But climbing upward I left the villas behind and turning on the slopes looked out to where the blue of the sea faded into a soft haze. To the west the red cliffs of Sidi bou Said caught the eye, and the clustering white houses of its beautiful village. On the summit of the hill of Carthage stands the ugly modern Roman Catholic cathedral, avenging by its presence the deaths of Saint Perpetua and the unfortunately named poor little Saint Felicity, Christian martyrs in the Roman amphitheatre of Carthage.
Adjoining the cathedral is the monastery of the Pères Blancs, who have a small museum filled with Punic and Roman remains. There are fragments of statues, broken vases, earthenware lamps, coins, medals, sarcophagi in which one can see frail skeletons preserved in their covering of aromatic gum. These haughty warriors and princesses lie helplessly exposed to the gaze of every idle tourist, the painted lids of their resting places standing sentinel-fashion behind each. I am no antiquarian. All I carried away was a confused impression of a débris washed up on the shores of Time; of delicate bracelets and gold rings, of tiny charms, of iridescent glass bottles dug up from the sand, of all the odds and ends that human beings gather round them. I think they were not so very different from ourselves, these people of long ago. And now conquerors and conquered mingle their remains in the sterile peace of museum shelves. In the garden outside were ranged pieces of pillars, fragments of vast statues, here a giant hand, there a colossal head.